Members of the Education Committee met today (Wednesday 4 June) and agreed the recommendation to proceed with the statutory public consultation for the co-location of the new St Clement’s School alongside a new Dingwall Primary School on a shared site with enhanced community facilities.
A public meeting will be held on Wednesday 2 July to discuss the Council’s proposal. There will also be the opportunity for stakeholders to submit views to the Council ahead of the meeting and subsequently prior to any final recommendation and decision being made.
At a meeting of The Highland Council on Thursday 27 March 2024, elected members unanimously agreed investment priorities for the first phase of The Highland Investment Plan (HIP), including a recommendation to co-locate St Clement’s and Dingwall Primary schools at a new Dingwall Community Point of Delivery (POD) site, on the basis that this provides the greatest educational benefits for pupils of both schools, and the maximum economic benefit for the wider community. The proposal to relocate St Clement’s School alongside a new Dingwall Primary School on a shared site will require to undergo a statutory consultation.
Education Committee Chair, Cllr John Finlayson said: “The commitment to build a new school that retains the school’s unique identity has been endorsed by Committee today. The Highland Investment Plan offers an exciting co-location option that has even greater benefits for our young learners than any other previously proposed.
“The strong collaborative working between St Clement’s School, Dingwall Primary and the wider Dingwall community has always played an integral part in our young people’s learning journey. Co-locating will enhance inclusion and equitable opportunities for success, providing the best learning environments for all our children.
“It will increase opportunities for pupils with a disability to participate in wider curriculum and social opportunities, whilst ensuring specialist support and facilities are tailored to individual needs in their own individually designed standalone school and associated outdoor spaces.
“A statutory consultation will now be undertaken for the proposed new site for St Clement’s School.”
The consultation will begin on 9 June 2025 and will end on 3 October 2025. This period allows for the statutory minimum of six weeks, including at least thirty school days.
A public meeting will be held at 6:30pm on Wednesday 2 July at St Clement’s School with an opportunity to attend virtually for those unable to be there in person.
A consultant architect with extensive experience of designing special schools and additional support needs facilities has been engaged to assist with the development of the new St Clement’s School project brief and initial floor plans and external layouts have been prepared. A series of design workshops will be held with stakeholder groups in the coming weeks to establish a clear vision for the new school. This will ensure that it provides first-rate facilities to meet the needs of every child that will attend St Clement’s in the future and maximise the benefits to be realised.
The Highland Council, Education Committee met today (Wednesday 4 June 2025) and received a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the Education and Learning Service, including positive school leaver destinations and an update on the refreshed attainment strategy and the Education and Learning management restructure.
Education Committee Chair, Cllr John Finlayson said: “The set of reports presented to us today, show positive steps in the educational journey of all our learners across Highland and the positive contribution they will bring as part of our ‘Workforce for the Future’ ambitions.
“The last few months, has been as is always expected at this time of year, challenging for our senior phase learners as they have prepared for and taken their SQA exams, finalised apprenticeships and completed portfolios and module-based learning. I commend the pupils and staff for all their efforts and hope that as we draw near to the school summer holidays, pupils take some down time to reflect on what they do next in terms of learning, life and work.
“It is encouraging to see the positive destination statistics for our school leavers be that in employment, education, or training, which have produced the most positive figures we have seen in the last 5 years with 96.5% of 2,692 pupils achieving sustained destinations on leaving school.”
Cllr Finlayson added: “A refreshed attainment strategy with input from central officers, headteachers, and unions has positively progressed since our February Education Committee, and its strategic focus and workstreams will be discussed at our head teachers conference.
“At Committee today, we also received an update on the Education and Learning management restructure, a new area-based model with 8 operational areas. The changes deliver a simplified and streamlined structure, providing clear lines of responsibility and accountability.
“Improving outcomes for all our Highland learners remains a key priority and all of today’s reports outline the continued vision and commitment of The Highland Council’s Education and Learning Service and that of our partner services to move positively forward on our journey to excellence.”
At the Education Committee on Wednesday 4 June, Members were presented with the Integrated Children Services Plan Annual Report 2024/25.
The Integrated Children’s Service’s work continues as it enters the 3rd year of the delivery of the Integrated Children’s Service Plan. The report highlights the continued progress that has been made in 2024/25. The work of the Integrated Children Services Board has continued to be strengthened through the delivery groups and strong partnership across services and in all sectors.
The plan has been developed in collaboration with public sector bodies and third sector organisations and is informed by both the voice and testimony of children, young people and families and the needs of our communities as articulated through our Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (2023). The annual report details the significant work that has been undertaken by the delivery groups in progressing the priorities and change ideas.
Education Committee Chair, Cllr John Finlayson said: “Listening and learning from the views and experience of children, young people and their families is key to continuing to deliver an effective and relevant Integrated Children’s Services.
“We all have a duty and responsibility to support our communities in Highland, I along with my fellow Members recognise the importance of engaging with all partners, third sector, public and community groups to continue to improve the future prosperity and safety of the children living in Highland.
“This well supported plan demonstrates the exemplary wealth of professionals we have across Highland who are committed to integrating skills, experience and expertise to improve outcomes for children, young people and their families. The plan articulates how partners work together to provide services which are organised, equipped to deliver high-quality, joined-up, trauma-informed, responsive and preventative support to children and families.”
The programme supports a whole family approach that is family and person centred, with a strong emphasis on reducing inequalities and improving outcomes for children, young people and their families, by strengthening supports for families, to reduce crisis and family breakdown and to meet ‘The Promise’ in Highland. It also sets clear indicators for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of children’s services in terms of their success in responding to and addressing children’s wellbeing needs.
Highland Council’s dedicated road marking team has been fully mobilised to carry out road marking across the Highland region.
Chair of Highland Council’s Economy and Infrastructure Committee, Councillor Ken Gowans, said: “The Council has invested significantly in road maintenance as part of a broader program to improve Highland roads and the dedicated road marking team will help us to improve road safety for our communities. I’m delighted to see that the newly established team has made the most of the recent good weather to cover a lot of ground in the north-west and Skye, despite the challenging geography. Our new vehicles are also ensuring that the work is carried out quickly and effectively with minimal disruption for local people.”
Since April, the team has completed approx. 150km of white lines across Sutherland, Caithness and the Isle of Skye, with a further 190km of white lining works planned for over the summer months across the other areas of the Highlands, including Lochaber, Ross and Cromarty, Badenoch and Inverness. Exact timings will be weather-dependent, but we aim to give communities advance notice on social media wherever possible.
The operation requires a team of four operatives using two lorries. A feeder lorry is used to preheat and deliver the thermoplastic lining material to the lining lorry which then applies the hot material to the road surface as either an edge or centre line. Immediately after the line is applied, another nozzle adds reflective glass beads, followed by a final nozzle spraying clean water onto the line to cool the material, allowing traffic to flow immediately.
The road marking programme forms part of The Council’s £2.1 billion Highland Investment Plan which will provide 20 years of funding for roads and transport, schools, offices and community facilities throughout the Highlands.
At today’s Education Committee (Wednesday 4 June), Members noted the evidence base that supports the approach taken in Highland to address relationship and behaviour issues in our schools and agreed the actions being taken to ensure practice across Highland is in line with national recommendations.
The 2023/4 national Behaviour in Scottish Schools survey and subsequent report (BISSR) indicated a difference to behaviour in schools from the previous report (2016) and cited the significant impact of COVID-19 on overall attendance and behaviour in schools and communities across Scotland.
The BISSR findings identify that most children can manage school well most or all of the time, however the evidence identifies an increase in classroom disruption and in physical and verbal aggression.
Education Committee Chair, Cllr John Finlayson said: “To better reflect the relationships and behaviours across our Highland schools, we recently conducted an extensive school staff survey which gathered in-depth information about the behavioural barriers, indicating that low-level disruptive behaviour remains the thing that causes most impact in pre-school and infant classrooms.
“Last school session less than 2% of children were involved in reported staff/pupil incidents. In many cases their language, communication and cognitive skills were poorly developed. The age where there is the highest level of pupil-staff incidents in Highland is Primary One (28% of incidents are recorded in relation to 3-5 year olds). Our understanding of this is that very young children haven’t yet developed their language skills or understanding of social situations to enable them to communicate their needs well. After Primary One the number of reported incidents significantly reduce, indicating the developmental nature of this issue in primary schools.
“Ongoing training and staff support is regularly offered by the Council’s Psychological Service to help support the wellbeing of teaching and support staff at all levels and to aid them in understanding and intervening in relation to dysregulated and distressed behaviour.
“In the recent staff survey, staff were asked what successes they had in supporting dysregulated and distressed children. The greatest number of responses related to providing safe, quiet spaces where children regulate and find calm, often helped by a knowledgeable member of staff with whom they already have a relationship.
“Work continues to improve pre-school and infant school pupils’ development skills, to enable young children to effectively communicate with peers and staff and over time reduce dysregulation and low level disruptive behavioural patterns forming in school settings.”
To support staff, Highland Council has a Positive Relationships Framework and Guidance that is in line with the requirements of the Scottish Government policy landscape. Our Framework has drawn together relevant research and educational thinking. It promotes a more relationship-based approach, with a focus on self-regulation and co-regulation, which we know is effective in creating calm and respectful early years settings, classrooms and schools.
To read the report, click the link here (Item 10).
Good afternoon. This is an open meeting on June 4, 2025 of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under the Government in the Sunshine Act. Commissioners Caroline Crenshaw and Mark Uyeda are here with me in Washington, D.C., and Commissioner Hester Peirce is participating remotely.
Today, the Commission will consider a recommendation from the Division of Corporation Finance that the Commission issue a concept release seeking comment on whether to revise the definition of foreign private issuer.
The Commission first defined foreign private issuer in 1967.[1] Then in 1983, it developed the foundation of the current definition through a test to determine whether a foreign issuer is “essentially [a] U.S. issuer” based on percentage of U.S. ownership, nationality of the management team, and location of business operations.[2] The world, financial markets, and corporate legal structures have significantly changed over the past forty-plus years.
The U.S. capital markets have been and still are the envy of the world. Foreign companies from across the globe seek new capital from U.S. investors for their businesses and seek to have their securities listed on a U.S. exchange for a variety of potential benefits, including higher valuation, greater liquidity, and enhanced reputation.
Foreign companies that qualify as foreign private issuers receive these potential benefits while also being offered several accommodations under the federal securities laws that are not available to U.S. companies. These include provisions such as (1) not needing to file quarterly reports, proxy statements, or Section 16 reports, (2) not being subject to Regulation FD, and (3) furnishing current reports on Form 6-K, rather than filing the more prescriptive Form 8-K.[3]
As early as 1935, the Commission recognized that our rules should not treat foreign companies exactly the same as domestic companies,[4] likely because many aspects of their corporate operations, business and market practices, accounting standards, tax regimes, compensation and pension benefits, and organic corporate governance laws may be quite different from those in the United States. Yet, at the same time, the Commission has always been mindful of the paramount need for the adequacy of the disclosures provided by the foreign companies to their U.S. investors whenever it considered new accommodations under the federal securities laws for these companies. When the Commission provided foreign companies with additional regulatory relief in 1967, it noted “the improvement in the reporting of financial information by foreign issuers, resulting from changes in foreign corporate laws, stock exchange requirements, and voluntary disclosure by the companies themselves.”[5]
Today, maintaining reasonable accommodations in the federal securities laws to attract foreign companies to U.S. markets and to provide U.S. investors with the opportunity to trade in those companies under U.S. laws and regulations remains an objective. That objective must be balanced with other considerations, including providing investors with material information about these foreign companies, including their unique corporate structures, and ensuring that domestic companies are not competitively disadvantaged with respect to regulatory requirements.
The first step in striking this balance is to determine which foreign companies should qualify as foreign private issuers and be able to avail themselves to the accommodations. It has been several decades since the Commission last examined the characteristics of the foreign private issuer community. The global markets have changed significantly in those decades. It is therefore only prudent for the Commission to better understand the companies that are using the foreign private issuers accommodations today and determine if changes are needed to better protect U.S. investors. Based on the latest data from 2023, for example, almost 55% of foreign private issuers are traded exclusively, or nearly-exclusively, in the United States.[6] Among these issuers, the most common jurisdiction of incorporation is the Cayman Islands and the most common jurisdiction of headquarters is China.[7]
When the United States is effectively a foreign company’s exclusive or primary trading market and the company is not subject to meaningful disclosure requirements or securities law oversight in its jurisdiction of incorporation or headquarters, careful consideration should be given to whether the foreign company is eligible for accommodations under the federal securities laws that are unavailable to U.S. companies. This analysis begins with considering whether the current definition of a foreign private issuer is appropriately tailored. The concept release solicits public input on this issue, and I encourage market participants to submit their views and engage with my office and the other commissioners’ offices on this topic.
Before I turn the meeting over to Cicely LaMothe, Acting Director of the Division of Corporation Finance, to discuss the recommendation, I would like to thank the following staff members for their work on this concept release.
From the Division of Corporation Finance: Cicely LaMothe, Sebastian Gomez Abero, Ted Yu, Michael Coco, Kelsey Glover, Kateryna Kuntsevich, Mark Green, Ryan Milne, Wei Lu, Heather Rosenberger, Kayla Roberts, Anna Abramson, and John Fieldsend.
From the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis: Lyndon Orton, Mattias Nilsson, Evan Avila, Tara Bhandari, and Timothy Dodd. I would especially like to recognize Mattias and Evan because the data in their white paper on trends in the foreign private issuer population[8] significantly contributed to the concept release.
From the Office of International Affairs: Kathleen Hutchinson, Matthew Greiner, Morgan Macdonald, Michael Ferrario, Jordan Spain, and Katerina Ossenova.
From the Office of the General Counsel: Jeffrey Finnell, Bryant Morris, Johanna Losert, Mike Killoy and Cynthia Bien.
From the Office of the Chief Accountant: Ryan Wolfe, Shaz Niazi, Nigel James, Chauncey Martin, Mai-Khoi Nguyen-Thanh, Jill Davis, Sarah Esquivel, and Ella Karafiat.
Now I will turn the meeting over to Cicely for the staff’s recommendation.
[1] Adoption of Rules Relating to Foreign Securities, Release No. 34-8066 (Apr. 28, 1967) [32 FR 7845 (May 30, 1967)] (the “1967 Release”).
G7 Foreign Ministers Declaration on Maritime Security and Prosperity
Media Note
March 14, 2025
The text of the following statement was released by the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union.
Begin Text:
We, the Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union, reaffirm the G7’s steadfast commitment to contribute towards a free, open, and secure maritime domain based on the rule of law that strengthens international security, fosters economic prosperity, and ensures the sustainable use of marine resources.
Maritime security and prosperity are fundamental to global stability, economic resilience, and the well-being of all nations, and the conservation and sustainable use of ocean ecosystems is essential to all life on Earth. Over 80% of global trade is transported by sea, and 97% of global data flows through submarine cables. Disruptions to maritime routes pose a direct threat to international food security, critical minerals, energy security, global supply chains, and economic stability. We express deep concern over the growing risks to maritime security, including strategic contestation, threats to freedom of navigation and overflight, and illicit shipping activities. State behaviour in these areas has increased the risk of conflict and environmental damage, and imperils all nations’ prosperity and living standards, especially for the world’s poorest.
We recognize the role of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as the legal framework for governing all activities in the oceans and the seas.
We recall the G7 Statements on Maritime Security adopted in Lübeck (2015) and Hiroshima (2016). We welcome related work presently underway through other G7 ministerial tracks and working groups, on a range of issues including securing undersea cable networks and combating abandoned fishing gear. We welcome, as well, G7 work relating to transnational organized crime and terrorism that touches on the maritime domain, including in relation to piracy and armed robbery at sea, trafficking in persons, and strengthening the maritime law enforcement capabilities of coastal states. We acknowledge the importance of regional maritime security frameworks, to support coastal states to address collectively threats to their maritime security. We welcome existing initiatives, such as the G7++ Friends of the Gulf of Guinea (G7++ FoGG, that Canada chairs this year), which has been, the primary forum for dialogue among G7 members and partners on maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea.
Emerging Threat on Safe Seas and Freedom of Navigation and Overflight
Enhancing Stability: We underscore the importance of freedom of navigation and overflight and other internationally lawful uses of the high seas and the exclusive economic zones as well as to the related rights and freedoms in other maritime zones, including the rights of innocent passage, transit passage and archipelagic sea lanes passage, as provided for under international law. We share a growing concern at recent, unjustifiable efforts to restrict such freedom and to expand jurisdiction through use of force and other forms of coercion, including across the Taiwan Strait, and in the South China Sea, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea. We condemn China’s illicit, provocative, coercive and dangerous actions that seek unilaterally to alter the status quo in such a way as to risk undermining the stability of regions, including through land reclamations, and building of outposts, as well as their use for military purpose. In areas pending final delimitation, we underline the importance of coastal states refraining from unilateral actions that cause permanent physical change to the marine environment insofar as such actions jeopardize or hamper the reaching of the final agreement, as well as the importance of making every effort to enter into provisional arrangements of a practical nature, in those areas. We condemn, as well, dangerous vessel maneuvers, the indiscriminate attacks against commercial vessels and other maritime actions that undermine maritime order based on the rule of law and international law. We reiterate that the award rendered by the Arbitral Tribunal on 12 July 2016 is a significant milestone, which is legally binding upon the parties to those proceedings and a useful basis for peacefully resolving disputes between the parties. We reaffirm that our basic policies on Taiwan remain unchanged and emphasize the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait as indispensable to international security and prosperity. We welcome the resumption of exports from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. Freedom of navigation for commercial shipping in the Black Sea must be upheld.
Attempts to Change the Status Quo by Force: We oppose unilateral attempts to change the status quo, in particular by force or coercion including in the East and South China Seas. We undertake to implement means through which to track systematically and report on attempts to change the status quo by force and by the establishment of new geographical facts, including through coercive and dangerous actions on the oceans and seas that might threaten regional and international peace and security.
Protecting Critical Maritime and Undersea Infrastructure: We are seized of the fact that vital energy and telecommunications infrastructure under the oceans and seas connects our economies and is vital to our prosperity. We recall the G7 Joint Statement on Cable Connectivity for Secure and Resilient Digital Communications Networks (2024) and the New York Joint Statement on the Security and Resilience of Undersea Cables in a Globally Digitalized World (2024). We share a growing concern that undersea communications cables, subsea interconnectors and other critical undersea infrastructure have been subject to critical damage through sabotage, poor seamanship or irresponsible behaviour which have resulted in potential internet or energy disruption in affected regions, delays in global data transmission, or compromised sensitive communications. We will enhance our cooperation with industry mitigate risks, reduce bottlenecks to operational tasks while strengthening repair capacities in order to improve the overall resilience of critical undersea and maritime infrastructure. In this respect, we welcome the EU Action Plan on Cable Security adopted in February 2025 by the European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Maritime Crime: Maritime crime, including piracy, armed robbery at sea, maritime arms trafficking and sanctions evasion, human trafficking, illegal drug trafficking and Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated (IUU) Fishing, continues to impede maritime security, freedom of navigation, and our economy and prosperity. We have been working together to tackle these maritime crimes, but maritime illegal activities have extended into new areas, to become an urgent issue to be addressed. We welcome the G7 Action Plan to combat migrant smuggling adopted under Italy’s 2024 G7 Presidency.
Protecting Freedom of Trade: In the past year, indiscriminate Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have endangered maritime security of vessels and their crews, disturbed international trade, and exposed neighboring countries to environmental hazards. Enabled by Iran’s military, financial, and intelligence support, these illegal attacks have also contributed to increased tension in the Middle East and Yemen, with severe repercussions on the intra-Yemeni peace process. The vessel “Galaxy Leader” seized by the Houthis must be released immediately. We appreciate the efforts of all those countries that have engaged to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, protecting crucial shipping lanes and helping to restore regular flows of trade through the Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In this regard, we commend the efforts of EU’s maritime operation “Aspides” and U.S.-led operation “Prosperity Guardian”.
Safe Shipping and Supply Chain Security
Curtailing Unsafe and Illicit Shipping Practices: The rise of unsafe and illicit shipping practices, including fraudulent registration and registries, poses a significant threat to global trade and environmental sustainability. We are concerned that unsafe and illicit shipping imposes heavy costs on industry, governments and citizens. Russia’s ability to earn revenue has been sustained through its extensive effort to circumvent the G7+ oil price cap policy through its shadow fleet of often older, underinsured, and poorly maintained ships that routinely disable their automatic identification systems or engage in “spoofing” to avoid detection and circumvent international safety, environmental, and liability rules and standards. North Korea continues to pursue its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and evade sanctions, particularly through its illicit maritime activities, including prohibited ship to-ship transfers of petroleum and other UN-banned commodities. Through G7 coordination, we have exposed North Korea uses of “dark” vessels – those that engage in illicit activity – to circumvent United Nations Security Council mandated sanctions. Russia and North Korea are strengthening their economic relations including through maritime routes, such as the reported transfer of petroleum products from Russia to North Korea Unregulated, “dark” vessels undertake IUU fishing, destroying marine habitats and depleting fish stocks, with negative impacts for biodiversity and food security. Unregulated, inadequately insured “dark” vessels also pose a high risk of maritime accidents, including in fragile ecosystems such as the Arctic and Antarctic. We commit to strengthen our coordination, amongst the G7 and with other partners, to prevent the use of unregistered or fraudulently registered, uninsured and substandard vessels engaged in sanctions evasion, arms transfers, illegal fishing and illicit trade. We encourage relevant International Organizations to improve maritime domain awareness by expanding satellite-based vessel tracking and establishing comprehensive data records of the movement of individual ships and of ship-to-ship transfers, as a means of identifying and tracking illicit maritime activities. We are also committed to capacity building of the countries in the region in law enforcement and Maritime Domain Awareness.
Shadow Fleet Task Force: We invite members of the Nordic-Baltic 8 (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden), and possibly others, to join participating G7 members in a Shadow Fleet Task Force to enhance monitoring and detection and to otherwise constrain the use of shadow fleets engaged in illegal, unsafe or environmentally perilous activities, building on the work of others active in this area. The Task Force will constitute a response by the participating States to the call by the International Maritime Organization in its Resolution A.1192(33) of 6 December 2023 for Members States and all relevant stakeholders to promote actions to prevent illegal operations in the maritime sector by shadow fleets and their flag states, including illegal operations for the purposes of circumventing sanctions, evading compliance with safety or environmental regulations, avoiding insurance costs, or engaging in other illegal activities.
Enhancing Maritime Supply Chain Resilience and Energy and Food Security: Maritime supply chains will continue to underpin the global economy, but these face a variety of threats, both present and future, stemming from both geopolitical tensions and environmental factors. Maritime disruptions raise consumer costs, increase transit times, and can reduce demand in importing countries, which in turn means lower revenues and diminished competitiveness for producers in exporting countries. Such vulnerabilities in maritime transport can undermine energy and food security, particularly for developing nations reliant on stable shipping routes, including Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs). We welcome maritime initiatives involving and supported by G7 partners intended to promote energy and food security, such as the Grain from Ukraine scheme, and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. We invite cooperation with the African Union (pursuant to Africa’s Integrated Maritime Strategy 2050) and other relevant International Organizations to identify best practices for enhancing maritime supply chain resilience and for safeguarding energy and food security, including in times of geopolitical crisis.
Promoting Safe and Resilient Ports and Strategic Waterways: Port ownership and operational control matter to national security, as foreign control or influence over critical port infrastructure can create vulnerabilities in trade, in defense and security, and in economic stability. Port resilience is also crucial to economic stability and global trade and yet ports face growing risks from environmental degradation, extreme weather events and geopolitical conflicts. Strengthening port security and modernizing infrastructure are essential to maintaining safe and efficient maritime trade. Ensuring that the ownership and management of strategic waterways and key maritime choke points are not vulnerable to undue influence by potential adversaries is also essential to national security. We underscore the importance of scrutiny of ownership structures and port management and resilience within our own national jurisdictions, including with regard to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems, to ensure that adversaries do not gain leverage over supply chains, military operations, or the flow of strategic resources. We will work with partners and with relevant International Organizations to encourage robust cybersecurity standards for port ICT infrastructure, to increase resilience against malicious cyber incidents on maritime logistical networks, to reduce monopolistic power over key supply chain nodes, to promote secure and transparent port ownership, to limit unsolicited or undue foreign influence over critical infrastructures and strategic waterways, and to otherwise encourage greater focus on such potential vulnerabilities.
Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) at sea poses a significant hazard to the marine environment, to the safety of fishermen and other users of the maritime space, and to various marine economic activities. We commit to enhancing diplomatic efforts and to exchanging best practices among national authorities, relevant international and regional organizations, and relevant industry sectors to accelerate the clean-up of UXO from the seas and ocean.
Sustainable Stewardship of Maritime Resources
Strengthen Enforcement Against IUU Fishing: IUU fishing is a major contributor to declining fish stocks and to marine habitat destruction. It may account for a third of all fishing activity worldwide, at a cost to the global economy of more than US$23 billion per year and with negative consequences for fisheries as an enduring economic asset, including for developing countries. We welcome the Canadian-led Dark Vessel Detection System in Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and members of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) and would see value in replicating the model to support other partners whose fisheries are under threat from IUU fishing. We recognize that data sharing and transparency play a key role in this fight by exposing bad actors and that technological advances can support a robust Monitoring, Control and Surveillance and enforcement landscape. We encourage further progress in addressing IUU fishing, working with and through relevant International Organizations to establish and strengthen rules to sustainably manage fish stocks on the high seas and to improve the enforcement of these measures, including through the further development of detection technologies, aircraft patrols and high seas boarding and inspection of vessels, building upon the 2022 G7 Ocean Deal.
We welcome the Third UN Ocean Conference, in Nice, France, from 9 to 13 June 2025.
PARTNERSHIPS
This G7 Maritime Security and Prosperity Declaration provides a framework for cooperation with non-G7 Partners, including countries hosting major ports, large merchant fleets, or extensive flag registries as well as relevant regional and International Organizations, such as the International Maritime Organization and ASEAN. We would welcome robust cooperation with Partners to take forward the goals set out in this Declaration, consistent with the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, under the efforts of the G7 countries, including a free, open, prosperous and secure Indo-Pacific region, to build a free and open maritime order based on the rule of law, and of commitment to the sustainable development of the world’s maritime spaces.
We welcome the cooperation on Coast Guard Functions, including the Global Coast Guard Forum hosted by Italy in 2025, as well as the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, which could also support the objectives of this Declaration.
Secretary Rubio’s Meeting with Danish Foreign Minister Rasmussen
Readout
April 3, 2025
The below is attributable to Spokesperson Tammy Bruce:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen today in Brussels. Secretary Rubio reaffirmed the strong relationship between the United States and the Kingdom of Denmark. They discussed shared priorities including increasing NATO defense spending and burden sharing, and addressing the threats to the Alliance, including those posed by Russia and China. They also reviewed ongoing coordination to enhance stability and security in Europe and to secure an enduring peace in Ukraine.
Senior Bureau Official for the Bureau of International Organization Affairs McCoy Pitt is currently in Geneva, Switzerland, where he is traveling from April 7-11 to meet with counterparts and participate in the consultative-level meeting of the Geneva Group on UN governance and management. While in Geneva, he will hold additional meetings with leadership of several UN agencies.
From April 14-15, Senior Bureau Official Pitt will travel to Rome, Italy, to meet with officials from the Rome-based UN agencies and representatives from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He will also engage in discussions with officials from the Holy See to discuss a number of shared priorities.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio with Scott Jennings on SiriusXM Patriot
Interview
February 10, 2025
QUESTION: Scott Jennings sitting here on SiriusXM Patriot 125, normally the David Webb Show. I am guest hosting for Mr. Webb today, and it is our honor to welcome to the airwaves this morning the Secretary of State of the United States Marco Rubio, former senator from Florida, and now, thanks to President Trump, the United States Secretary of State.
Mr. Secretary, welcome to the show.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Hey, thanks for having me.
QUESTION: I appreciate you being on this morning. You’re on the move. You have just returned from your first foreign trip. You went to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. I want to jump right in this morning and just ask how was the trip, what did we accomplish, and what’s the disposition in those countries towards the United States now that we have a new administration?
SECRETARY RUBIO: I think the disposition is very positive. I think these are countries that want to be aligned with the United States. That’s why we picked them. They also happen to be countries that are on the migratory route, on the drug routes, and face tremendous challenges because of that. These are the places people cross in order to come to the U.S., so each of them are very different.
Like in the case of Panama, obviously we have an issue with the canal and foreign influence over it, and so we raised that. And I think we’re going to make a couple of announcements. We saw the – Panama pulled out of the Belt and Road Initiative with China, which is the first country in the Western Hemisphere to actually pull out of that. And I think we’ll hear more things. They’ve got to work through their own processes there, but I think we’ll see even more in the days to come. So, it’s very positive.
Costa Rica is an advanced economy. They’re doing very well, of course, but they do have some challenges where drug rings are running through there, and so we partner with them to stop that. But that’s a very pro-American government, and we wanted to interact with them. They’re very good partners and, also, have been very strong at standing up to the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the region, and so that’s been great.
And then moved on to El Salvador. We have a great partner there in Nayib Bukele. I’ve known him for a long time, and he made a very generous offer. I don’t know if it can happen because of our own laws, but he offered to not only take in gang members that are illegally in the country but also any Americans who are in our jails – almost like outsourcing. So, it was an interesting offer from him. But he’s a great pro-American leader and, again, someone that has been very popular in his country by the way. He’s like 90 percent approval rating.
Guatemala is a country that obviously is right on the border with Mexico. They struggle with the migration. They’re a source country, but they’re also a transit country for drugs and people. And so, they’re trying to – they’re doing the best they can with their limited resources, and we’re helping them to stop the drugs and the migration. But they’ve also – they’re going to almost double the number of deportation flights they’re going to take, and they’re also going to accept third-country people, people from other countries that are not from Guatemala, as part of this process, and then from there move them on to the – their nation of origin.
And then we finished in the Dominican Republic, which really the biggest challenge they face there are two-fold. The one is what’s happening right across their border with Haiti, which they’re deporting people back to Haiti every day. That – we can’t really visit Haiti right now, but that’s as close as we could get. And so, we wanted to talk about that from there, and that’s important because that also poses a threat to the United States that there’s a mass migration event. And it’s just a horrifying situation with these gangs taking over Port-au-Prince or large parts of it.
And then they’re also a great partner stopping drugs. A lot of drug rings are – bring – try to bring drugs into the Dominican Republic because from there, over the Mona Passage, they get to Puerto Rico. And once you get into Puerto Rico, you’re in the U.S. There’s no more customs after that. There’s no more border protection after that. So, it’s something we’re going to work with them on.
So, it’s a good start to the trip, and then we finished off on Friday going to Southern Command, which is the Pentagon’s command for the whole region, and talked through some of these issues with them and the partnerships they have in the region. So, it’s a good way to start my – I guess my second – end my second week as Secretary of State.
QUESTION: Yeah, most folks when they start a new job in the second week are still looking for the bathroom, and here you are in all these other countries. It’s a really good way to get going.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah, well, we’re still looking for the bathrooms but – finding out where everything is at in the building, but it was important to get out there and visit these countries early.
QUESTION: So, you raised an issue that I think Donald Trump, President Trump, deserves a lot of credit for tackling immediately, and that is the concept of the United States combatting Chinese influence in this region, in this hemisphere. And obviously, this has been an issue with Panama and the Panama Canal, but it’s really an issue everywhere. Can you talk a little bit about this? Is this one of your principal missions to make sure that the United States, and not China, is the dominant superpower at a minimum in this region and in the world?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Yeah, look, China is a rich, powerful country and that’s what they’re going to be. Like that’s not going to change, right? They’ve got over a billion people. They’ve got a big economy, second-largest economy in the world. I mean, and we’re going to be competing with them for the rest of the century and beyond. And I think the story of the 21st century is going to be about what happened between the U.S. and China.
What we can’t allow is for that to come at our expense. What we can’t allow is an imbalance, a dangerous imbalance, to build up where they’re more powerful than we are, and then – or we become dependent on them. And that danger is already there that we’ve become dependent on them for supply chains, for manufacturing, economically, all these sorts of things.
So, what’s happened in part of the region is that they swoop in. And look, they’re doing what I would do. If I was in charge of China, I would do exactly what they’re doing. But I have to – I I’m not in charge of China. I run the State Department for the United States and I’m an American citizen, so I’ve got to do what’s good for America. That’s what President Trump is for. And that includes not getting run out of the Western Hemisphere, not waking up one day and finding out that China has more influence over our neighboring countries than we do, that China has more presence in our neighboring countries than we do. That’s – it’s – geography is real and it’s right on top of us, and these are countries that are our neighbors, and we just – we can’t live in a world in which they have more influence and more presence than we do in the countries closest to us.
QUESTION: So, on the prospect of American influence in the world – and I wholeheartedly agree with you about our need to stand up to China – a lot of people are wondering about the reorientation of American soft power in the world. Obviously, President Trump and his administration and working with you have made some dramatic shifts in the way we distribute foreign aid and the bureaucracy, the USAID bureaucracy, which you are now also simultaneously in charge of.
I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there and a lot of political attacks out there of people trying to score points. I just kind of want to set the record straight here about what we’re doing. And we’ve eliminated some bureaucracy, but you’re in charge of American soft power and you’re in charge of our influence around the world. Can you kind of give us an idea of how this is going to work, and why the American people should be reassured that American influence is going to be top of mind for your State Department?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, first of all, we’re not walking away from foreign aid. We will be involved in foreign aid. I believe that foreign aid done right is good for the country, but it has to be done right. Now, the idea that somehow we spend between $40 and $60 billion on foreign aid and all that money is well spent or on things that make sense is absurd. There’s a lot of it that isn’t. And so the goal is very simple: Go through all of our foreign aid – a lot of it is through USAID, some of it is through State Department; identify the foreign aid that makes sense, the foreign aid that actually supports our country and that supports our national interests, and continue to do that; and then get rid of the ones that are a waste of money, or in some cases or run counter to our foreign – to our national interest and to our interests around the world. And that’s what we’re going through right now.
The problem is that this foreign aid industrial complex has built up of NGOs and all kinds of groups that benefit from these programs, and argue that you can’t get rid of a single one of them; if you cut any of them, if you even ask questions about them, you’re undermining American soft power. So, this is not – despite some of these reports, this is not about walking away from foreign aid. This is about doing the aid that makes sense and getting rid of the aid that does not make sense. That’s it. That’s what this is about.
So we were in Guatemala, right? And they have a program where we help them to improve their police department so they can stop and identify fentanyl before it gets into America. That’s foreign aid we’re going to support. In fact, I issued a waiver so we can continue that program. There are other things that we’re not going to do. We shouldn’t be sponsoring LGBTQ operas. I don’t know how that foreign – furthers the national interest.
And this is taxpayer money. Look, if someone wants to pay for that stuff, you’re more than happy to go out, go ahead. It’s legal. Go out and raise all the money, private-sector money, and spend it on that. But we shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money or using American Government agencies to sponsor things that make absolutely no sense. So, we put a pause on all foreign aid, and now we’re going through it project by project. We’re going to get rid of the ones that don’t make sense, and we’re going to keep or even build on the ones that do make sense.
QUESTION: So, the things that make sense in your mind – fighting drugs, fighting illegal immigration. What about lifesaving issues? There’s been a lot of back and forth in the media about things that we do from a humanitarian perspective that are lifesaving medical-type programming, particularly in Africa with PEPFAR and malaria and such. How do you view those things?
SECRETARY RUBIO: I’m a supporter of PEPFAR. I have been in Congress. I am now as Secretary of State. It’s a program we want to continue. Obviously, we’re going to have questions about it. Look, if PEPFAR is working well, it’s a program that should be getting smaller over time, not bigger, right? Because you’re preventing HIV, you’re preventing the spread of HIV, and so people aren’t testing positive because their viral load gets down, they’re not passing it on to their children.
So ideally, it’s a program that over time shrinks, not expands, because less and less people are getting HIV or are transmitting it to their children. That was always the goal was an AIDS-free generation, so no child was born with HIV. And – but it’s a program I’ve supported, and we want to continue to do it. And things like are people going to starve to death, are we going to have a famine? Is it going to destabilize a country in a way that would be negative to our national interest and open the door for radical jihadists or others to take advantage? We’re going to continue to do those. But the problem is that the definition of humanitarian has expanded beyond that – to all kinds of other things that do not make sense. That doesn’t mean they’re bad ideas. Someone should do it. It just shouldn’t be the American taxpayer.
So that’s the kind of things that we’re going through right now and identifying. And by the way, we issued a waiver which allowed all these lifesaving programs to continue. And obviously, there’s – any time you have a pause or some hiccups about how to restart the payment programs, but all that’s going to get taken care of here very quickly, and those programs will continue. We’re not walking away from foreign aid. We are walking away from foreign aid that’s dumb, that’s stupid, that wastes American taxpayer money. We’re just not going to continue to do those.
QUESTION: I think that what you’re doing is long overdue. This whole bureaucracy existed, and it really existed with very little political oversight. And really all that the Trump Administration, at your direction, is doing is making sure that whatever money we spend somehow helps the national interest. And I think every American taxpayer wants the money we spend to help the national interest. And Trump and you, Mr. Secretary, on the right side of what I think is an 80-20 issue here. And so, you see this amazing disconnect in the media, people fussing about this.
But some of these projects that you’ve identified are patently ridiculous. And so, by moving this into your office and by taking personal political oversight over it, not only are you saving us money, but you’re just aligning our spending with what’s in direct interest of the United States foreign policy under the direction of the President of the United States. I mean, that’s the point of elections. That’s the point of having a government, not to let unelected bureaucrats determine our national direction but to let our political leadership do it.
Mr. Secretary, in the time that we have, I want to move ahead. You’re about to embark on your second foreign trip. You’re going to the Munich Security Conference, and then you’re going to the Middle East. I think you’re going to Israel, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia – obviously a hot spot or region. What is your mission here? What are we trying to accomplish in the Middle East? What’s your message at the Munich Security Conference later this week?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, in Munich, I think it’s just to reaffirm to everybody – even though it’s located in Europe – obviously, that’s where the forum is – it’s not just about Europe. People from all – leaders from all over the world go that conference. But the top of mind for everyone is going to be war in Ukraine, and the President has been very clear. President Trump has been clear that the war in Ukraine needs to end. There’s a – he’s going to sort of begin to lay out a broad path forward, and he wants that war to end. It’d be in the interest of everybody for that war to end, and so obviously we’ll be discussing that with foreign ministers and other leaders there.
And then in the Middle East, beyond just the – what we know has happened with – after October 7th, there’s some potentially exciting opportunities to really change the dynamic in that region, and that’s the things we want to talk about. We’ve seen in Lebanon where a new government is now in place and Hizballah has been – I mean, imagine a region where you have a stable Lebanese government and Hizballah is no longer controlling the southern part of Lebanon and threatening Israel every day. Imagine potentially – we’ve got to wait and see, right? – but a Syria no longer under Assad, no longer with Iranian or Russian influence, no longer with ISIS, sort of no longer a security threat to Isreal. Imagine a region where Israel now feels secure because of what’s happened in Lebanon and in Syria that they can enter into a peace deal with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf kingdoms; a Sunni-Israeli peace deal akin to the Camp David Accords with Egypt and the peace with Jordan. Suddenly you have a very different region where all kinds of things that were not possible before are now possible.
And that’s the opportunity that we hope to explore and see if it’s possible. We have an obligation to explore, at the end. I mean, President Trump has made very clear that part of his agenda is promoting peace in the world; and if there’s a chance to create conditions for peace, that’s certainly something we’re going to do our best to try to foster and be a part of.
QUESTION: I want to ask you briefly about the hostage deal that was in place as Biden was exiting and President Trump was coming in. Obviously, a few hostages have been released. Some of the video of the hostages is, frankly, horrific. What they had done to them in captivity at the hands of Hamas is nothing short of barbaric. I saw that President Trump last night on the way to the Super Bowl made a comment about this and said he’s seen some of these abductees coming out. He said, “They look like Holocaust survivors. I know there’s an agreement that Hamas releases a little every week, but I don’t know how long I’ll continue to endure this. My patience is running out.”
Is this something you’re going to discuss when you’re in the Middle East? Are we – is our patience running thin here, and are these hostages being more mistreated than we could have even imagined before?
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, I don’t think there’s any coincidence in the schedule that they’re being released where they obviously released the ones, they thought were in the best condition first, then over time you’re starting to see the impact of this. But I also think it’s very revealing of who Hamas is and what Hamas is.
You look at these images of what they – first of all, the humiliation that they have to go through. Just put aside for a moment the horrifying conditions they were kept and the horrifying things that happened to some of those hostages, on top of the fact that these were innocent civilians. I mean, none of these were soldiers. These are not combatants. These are just people that were abducted for purposes of being used as leverage. And they’re getting, what, 200 certified killers in exchange for one innocent hostage. But it reveals who Hamas is.
Look at these humiliation, they put them through before they’re released, where they do these big public displays of force. Do any of those Hamas fighters look like they’ve been skipping meals? Do any of those Hamas fighters that you see look like they’ve been suffering over the last year and a half? Clearly, these people are – the ones suffering are the people from Gaza, but not them. And then the conditions they’re held in. So, it’s incredibly revealing about what we’re dealing with. This is an evil organization. Hamas is evil. It’s pure evil. These are monsters. These are savages. That’s a group that needs to be eradicated.
And let me tell you, if they still are the dominant power in Gaza when all this is done, there is not going to peace in the Middle East, as long as a group like Hamas physically controls territory and is the most dominant power in Gaza or anywhere in the Middle East. And I hope people can see who these people actually are, in the condition of these hostages – not just the conditions that they’re in when they’re released, but what they have to endure on the way out.
QUESTION: You raise the issue of Gaza, and before you go, obviously President Trump made some news on this last week. And it strikes me that what you’re executing is a realistic foreign policy. I mean, we’re in the common-sense doctrine era of the United States, which people are saying thank goodness, finally.
On Gaza, on the idea of a two-state solution, is this no longer the policy of the United States? It seems to me that you all are injecting realism into this situation and that most of the people the Israelis have had to deal with over time simply don’t want peace, and we’ve been trying to put a square peg in a round hole here.
What is our policy? That people that run Gaza eventually are going to have to accept peace? And that’s not what – that’s just not been the disposition of the folks we’ve been dealing with heretofore.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, the big challenge for this whole two-state solution has not been Isreal. It’s been: Who’s going to govern that second state? Who’s going to be in charge of it? If the people in charge of it are Hamas or Hizballah or anybody like that, these are groups that – whose goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.
So, I don’t know how you’re going to have peace if you’re turning over territory to a group whose stated purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. Why would any country in the world agree to create a second state on their border that is governed by armed elements who kidnap babies and murder babies and rape teenage girls and abduct innocents and whose stated goal and purpose for existing is the – is your destruction? Who would agree to that? So that’s the fundamental challenge.
On the broader challenge of Gaza, the President’s just pointed to the obvious. I mean, Gaza is a place that, in addition to all the damage it suffered in the war – Hamas hides in the tunnels. It’s the civilians who they hide behind and underneath that have suffered the consequences of this. But that’s a place where there’s all kinds of unexploded munitions and bombs that Hamas has, that’s been used in the conflict. Someone’s got to go in – for anybody to be able to live there, someone’s got to – you’ve got to clean it up. You’ve got to clean all that out of there even before you begin the process of removing rubble and debris and rebuilding housing, like permanent structures. Who’s going to do that?
And right now, the only one who’s stood up and said I’m willing to help do it is Donald Trump. All these other leaders, they’re going to have to step up. If they’ve got a better idea, then now is the time. Now is the time for the other governments and other powers in the region, some of these very rich countries, to basically say, okay, we’ll do it. We’re going to pay for this; we’re going to step forward; we’re going to be the ones that take charge. None of them is offering to do it. And I think that you can’t go around claiming that you’re a fighter for, an advocate for the Palestinian people, but you’re not willing to do anything to help rebuild Gaza. And so far, we haven’t seen a lot of – they’ve all – they’ll all tell you what they’re not for. But we’re still waiting for more countries to step forward and say here’s what we’re willing to do. And right now, they’ve not been willing to do anything and – or at least anything concrete.
So that’s a challenge that President Trump’s put out there. And it’s outside the box, but that’s what he always is. I mean, he is going to state the obvious. It’s the one thing about Donald Trump – he doesn’t hide behind silly, traditional lies and things of that nature. He’s going to put out blunt truth. And the blunt truth is that the Middle East has, for too long, been a region of places all of whom love to talk but don’t want to do. So, it’s time – if they don’t like Donald Trump’s plan, then it’s time for these countries in the region to step forward and offer their solution.
QUESTION: Well, I think under President Trump’s leadership, under your leadership, we’re living in a common-sense era, we’re in an aspirational era, and we’re in a realistic era. And I think the American people are grateful for it. You have had an amazing run already, just in the first few weeks of being in office. You had an amazing first foreign trip. You’ve got one coming up this week.
The foreign affairs wins of the Trump Administration are already piling up, with Mexico agreeing to send troops to their border; Canada playing ball on their border issues; Colombia accepting the repatriation flights; Panama ending its Belt and Road Initiative deal with China; the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. We’ve taken out an ISIS leader in Somalia. You guys are off to an amazing start. And I think that’s why Donald Trump has a high approval rating right now, and why people are so grateful that you accepted this job as U.S. Secretary of State.
Secretary Rubio, thanks for being with us on SiriusXM Patriot today.
Up to $8 Million in Reward Offers for Information Leading to Arrests and/or Convictions of Leaders of Foreign Terrorist Organization LNFM Cartel
Press Statement
April 15, 2025
Today, the Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs is announcing reward offers under the Narcotics Rewards Program (NRP) of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction, in any country, of Mexican narcotics trafficker Johnny Hurtado Olascoaga, a/k/a “Pez,” and up to $3 million for information leading the arrest and /or conviction of his brother, Jose Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga, a/k/a “Fresa.” The Hurtado Olascoaga brothers are leaders of La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM) cartel in Mexico, which was designated by the Secretary of State on February 20 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT). This is the first rewards announcement related to an FTO-designated cartel.
The LNFM is a drug cartel based in the State of Mexico, and parts of Michoacán and Guerrero. The DEA estimates the LNFM is responsible for the transportation, importation, and distribution of over 36 metric tons of methamphetamine, 12 metric tons of Mexican heroin, and 12 metric tons of cocaine per year from Mexico into the United States.
Today’s reward offers complement the Department of Justice’s indictment of the Hurtado Olascoaga brothers in the Northern District of Georgia. The charges include conspiracy to manufacture and distribute controlled substances (specifically, heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl) knowing they would be imported into the United States; importation conspiracy; and drug distribution conspiracy. The Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also announced new sanctions today against the Hurtado Olascoaga brothers and two related LNFM members.
Today’s reward offers are authorized by the Secretary under the NRP, which supports law enforcement efforts to disrupt transnational crime globally and bring fugitives to justice as a key pillar of President Trump’s “America First” priorities. If you have information, please contact the DEA at +1 404-281-3220 (text/WhatsApp/Signal). If you are located outside of the United States, you can also visit the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate. If you are in the United States, you can also contact the local DEA field office.
ALL IDENTITIES ARE KEPT STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.Government officials and employees are not eligible for rewards.
***THE DAILY PUBLIC SCHEDULE IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE***
SECRETARY MARCO RUBIO
9:30 a.m. Secretary Rubio meets with North Macedonia Foreign Minister Timčo Mucunski at the Department of State. (CAMERA SPRAY AT THE TOP) Call time for video cameras, still cameras and writers is 9:00 a.m. from the 23rd Street entrance.
DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE CHRISTOPHER LANDAU
Deputy Secretary Landau attends meetings and briefings at the Department of State.
DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE FOR MANAGEMENT AND RESOURCES MICHAEL J. RIGAS
Deputy Secretary Rigas attends meetings and briefings at the Department of State.
SENIOR OFFICIAL FOR POLITICAL AFFAIRS LISA KENNA
Senior Official Kenna attends meetings and briefings at the Department of State.
BRIEFING SCHEDULE
1:45 p.m. Department Press Briefing with Spokesperson Tammy Bruce. (OPEN PRESS COVERAGE) The Department Press Briefing will be streamed live on the Department homepage and YouTube Channel.
On behalf of the United States of America, I extend our congratulations to the people of the Italian Republic on your National Day.
Italy is a key Ally in the Euro-Atlantic region. As we confront global security challenges together, we urge all European NATO Allies to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. We appreciate Italy’s continued support for efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war and value our ongoing cooperation with Prime Minister Meloni to combat illegal immigration, reduce energy dependency on hostile regimes, and counter unfair trade practices. The United States welcomes Italy’s leadership in advancing critical technologies and building a resilient, mutually beneficial industrial base across Europe.
With over 17 million Americans proudly claiming Italian heritage, our bond is rooted in both history and purpose. Together, we will continue delivering results – ensuring freedom, security, and prosperity for both our nations.
Source: United States of America – The White House (video statements)
“This Big Beautiful Bill is a perfect example of promises made and promises kept by President Trump in the campaign. He’s doing exactly what he said he was gonna do.” –Georgia State Rep. John Lahood
“I really think this delivers for the state of Georgia, for people in Georgia. It’s a pro-worker bill.” –Georgia State Rep. Chas Cannon
The Kyrgyz Republic has shown strong economic performance despite global uncertainties with robust growth, stabilizing inflation, and declining public debt.
Growth is expected to gradually moderate as external trade normalizes and domestic demand slows, while inflation remains stable with continued prudent monetary policy.
Sustaining macroeconomic stability and strengthening inclusive growth will require rebuilding policy buffers, enhancing fiscal sustainability, safeguarding monetary policy independence, and advancing structural reforms to boost productivity.
Washington, DC:The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) completed the Article IV Consultation for the Kyrgyz Republic on a lapse of time basis on May 22, 2025.[1]
The Kyrgyz Republic has performed remarkably well amid a highly uncertain external environment. The economy grew by 9 percent annually since 2022, headline inflation has returned to the central bank’s target range, and public debt declined to 36.6 percent of GDP in 2024.
Looking ahead, growth is projected to moderate to 6.8 percent in 2025 and converge to about 5¼ percent in the medium term as re-export trade moderates and domestic demand eases. Inflation is expected to remain broadly stable under the assumption of prudent monetary policy. The large-scale public investments would widen the overall fiscal deficit, but public debt would remain contained under 42 percent of GDP thanks to robust GDP growth.
In view of the heightened global uncertainty, medium term priorities include rebuilding policy buffers and advancing structural reforms to strengthen economy’s resilience to shocks and support higher and more inclusive growth.
Executive Board Assessment
The Kyrgyz Republic has demonstrated remarkable resilience amidst global economic uncertainty. The economy has sustained robust growth supported by considerable expansion of external trade, inflows of remittances and labor, and resilient domestic demand. Inflation has moderated to mid-single digits, though underlying demand pressures warrant vigilance to keep inflation within the central bank’s target range. Lower public debt provides the needed fiscal space for priority investment in public infrastructure, energy generation capacity and human capital development.
Looking ahead, economic activity is expected to moderate from the exceptionally high levels of the past three years as re-export trade normalizes. Growth is projected to converge to its potential rate of 5¼ percent in the medium term, but the outlook is highly uncertain and depends on regional geopolitical developments. A further escalation of sanctions on Russia could weaken remittances and growth due to a depreciation of the ruble and slower growth in Russia. Conversely, a lasting peace in the region could have the opposite impact, but may also unwind some of the trade and financial flows that have boosted growth in recent years. In an increasingly uncertain world, the medium-term priority is to strengthen resilience of the Kyrgyz economy to future shocks by rebuilding policy buffers and enhance prospects for higher and more inclusive growth through structural reforms.
Strong revenue performance and a prudent fiscal stance coupled with high GDP growth have contained public debt. To further strengthen fiscal sustainability and create fiscal space for large development needs, the authorities should enhance tax policy by reducing tax exemptions and special tax regimes, increasing progressivity of the Personal Income Tax, and further strengthening revenue administration. Containing the public wage bill and energy subsidies, channeling Kumtor profits to the budget, and privatization of nonstrategic commercial SOEs would also contribute to fiscal sustainability and provide additional fiscal resources. Containing fiscal deficits would also limit borrowing and ease inflation pressures.
Preserving monetary policy independence is essential to contain inflationary pressures and maintain price stability. In view of robust domestic demand, further efforts are needed to ensure that inflation remains within the central bank’s target range. Tightening of interest rates and liquidity conditions might be warranted, if inflation pressures persist or rise. Monetary policy effectiveness could be enhanced by lifting interest rate caps, extending instrument maturities, phasing out subsidized lending, and enhancing exchange rate flexibility. Staff supports the discontinuation of domestic gold purchases by the NBKR and recommends halting NBKR profit transfers to the budget until its capital reaches the statutory threshold.
Sustaining high growth rates requires structural reforms to increase productivity and improve the business climate. Priority reform areas include governance and SOE management, competition policies, labor markets, and climate adaptation. If duly implemented, the authorities’ anti-corruption strategy could lay a solid foundation for a more resilient and dynamic economy. Strengthening the rule of law and protection of property rights, reducing the SOE footprint and enhancing competition are crucial for building trust in public institutions and improving the business climate to encourage private investment and innovation. Reforms aimed at increasing labor market flexibility, reducing gender gaps, and improving social safety nets would also support more inclusive economic growth, while investments in sustainable energy and infrastructure, and health and education remain vital to enhance resilience to climate risks.
[1]Under Article IV of the IMF’s Articles of Agreement, the IMF holds bilateral discussions with members, usually every year. A staff team visits the country, collects economic and financial information, and discusses with officials the country’s economic developments and policies. On return to headquarters, the staff prepares a report, which forms the basis for discussion by the Executive Board. The Executive Board takes decisions under its lapse-of-time procedure when the Board agrees that a proposal can be considered without convening formal discussions.
Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Speech
Prime Minister’s remarks at a roundtable with Lewis Hamilton: 4 June 2025
The Prime Minister gave remarks this afternoon at a roundtable with Lewis Hamilton and a group of young people, in support of Lewis’ foundation Mission 44.
The Prime Minister gave remarks this afternoon at a roundtable with Lewis Hamilton and a group of young people, in support of Lewis’ foundation Mission 44.
This focused on how we can work together to ensure young people are supported to attend and thrive in school.
As part of the discussion, the PM confirmed that government will develop a best practice framework to help schools increase pupil engagement, alongside our work to recruit and retain brilliant and inspiring teachers in every classroom.
Can I just welcome everyone to Downing Street and to this room in particular. This is the Cabinet Room. This is the room where the Prime Minister sits in this chair, opposite the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and all the Cabinet members—including Bridget, who’s obviously responsible for education—and we sit here and make the big decisions of the day.
We do it every week, on a Tuesday morning, but we also do it when we need to make big decisions.
This building, this room, this table, these chairs—they’ve been used by Prime Ministers for decades.
You’re sitting around the Cabinet table where decisions were made about the First World War, the Second World War, and many other world events in recent years.
It’s not just a piece of history—it’s a place where leaders for many, many decades have made big decisions for our country.
It’s because one of the things Lewis and I talked about when we thought about the idea of getting something together like this was having young people in a position where they could use their voices and be heard.
And I thought there’s no better place than around the Cabinet table.
You’re sitting where people have made big decisions about the country, you’re here to influence big decisions about the country.
Some of you will want to talk more than others, but it’s important that we hear the voices of young people and really listen to them.
Because the danger if we don’t is – particularly if you’re a politician – that you make assumptions about what people think. Making decisions based on what you think they’re feeling. And that’s why having this opportunity to hear from you is so important.
I want to thank Lewis—this was his idea, this is his legacy. He’s inspired generations and is now using that influence on this project and is designed to make a real difference in the lives of young people across the country.
I think we need to acknowledge we’re in a really challenging time for young people. A lot of children left school at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and haven’t gone back to school. The achievement gap between the richest and poorest is back to levels we haven’t seen since 2011. That’s shocking. Because I like to think we’re a country that always moves forwards. Always taking a step in the right direction. So when things start going backwards we know we have a real problem.
That’s why I’m really pleased we’re going to publish a best practice framework—to encourage students to enjoy learning, achieve their potential, and have confidence.
I’ve got a 16-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter. My wife and I agreed: the two things that matters most to instil in them are that they’re happy and confident. And the best schools and teachers believe in their students. They set high expectations but also give the support that people need.
We’ve got what’s called an ‘Opportunity Mission’ which is part of what we want to achieve in government. Bridget is leading on this. It includes things like rolling out free breakfast clubs which are really important in schools, so that all children can come in and start the day with the opportunity for something to eat. Better access to mental health support which is desperately needed in schools. Getting more teachers into classrooms, and teachers in key subjects, supporting students back into school. And a big increase in the schools budget which has been much overdue.
All of that really matters because I was genuinely shocked when Bridget and I were discussing how we took on this work to learn that how far people go in their lives is still more likely to be determined by the income or salary of their parents than their own talent. That’s terrible. We’ve got to turn that around.
To some extent this is personal for me because I was lucky, I went through school, went off to university, became a lawyer, Chief Prosecutor, a politician and now I sit here.
But my brother had a different story to tell. He really struggled at school—and had difficulties learning, not because of a learning difficulty, but because then in his time he was pushed to one side and treated as someone who would never learn.
He struggled a lot as a result of that. You might think someone who sits here as Prime Minister has no idea what it’s like to struggle at school but I know from my own brother what it was like, and how much resilience and personal courage he had to have.
That shaped his life, and shaped my life as well.
As I said to some of you earlier, sometimes politics is about big decisions, policies, data analysis, and speeches.
But most of the time, it’s about who do you have in your mind’s eye when you make a decision?
Do you really know who you’re talking about?
Do you know the impact you have on their lives?
Are you thinking about them when you make those decisions?
That’s why I think it’s so important we’re having this session now because I will take away from this what you’ve said around this table.
I will take away the work that Lewis is doing. The importance of your discussions—whether in this advisory or elsewhere—so that we have got you in our mind’s eye when we make decisions about what to do. So let’s get on with it.
The question we really want to discuss in this session is how can we make sure all young people are supported to succeed at school?
Thank you for the work you’re doing.
Thank you for using your influence to make this happen.
I’m really proud to be able to sit here and support you.
Secretary-General of ASEAN, Dr. Kao Kim Hourn, met with the Minister of International Trade of Canada, H.E Maninder Sidhu, at the OECD Headquarters in Paris, France, on 4 June 2025. Their discussions explored potential opportunities to deepen ASEAN- OECD cooperation, aligned with the implementation of the OECD Southeast Asia Regional Programme (SEARP) in 2026, including specific areas to support the ASEAN Community Vision 2045.
The post Secretary-General of ASEAN meets with the Minister of International Trade of Canada appeared first on ASEAN Main Portal.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Maria Papageorgiou, Leverhulme Early Career Researcher, School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology, Newcastle University
The US president, Donald Trump, claimed he was able to secure deals totalling more than US$2 trillion (£1.5 trillion) for the US on his tour of the Gulf states in May. Trump said “there has never been anything like” the amount of jobs and money these agreements will bring to the US.
However, providing a lift for the US economy wasn’t the only thing on Trump’s mind. China’s influence in the wider Middle East region is growing fast – so much so that it was even able to mediate a detente between bitter regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023.
Trump’s attempt to strengthen ties with countries in the Middle East is probably also a deliberate attempt to contain China’s growing regional ambitions.
China has spent the past two decades building up its economic and political relations with the Middle East. In 2020, it replaced the EU as the largest trading partner to the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Bilateral trade between them was valued at over US$161 billion (£119 billion).
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The Middle East has also become an important partner to China’s sprawling Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Massive infrastructure projects in the region, such as high-speed railway lines in Saudi Arabia, have provided lucrative opportunities for Chinese companies.
The total value of Chinese construction and investment deals in the Middle East reached US$39 billion in 2024, the most of any region in the world. That year, the three countries with the highest volume of BRI-related construction contracts and investment were all in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the UAE.
China has also strengthened its financial cooperation with Middle Eastern countries, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia. As part of China’s efforts to reduce global reliance on the US dollar for trade, it has arranged cross-border trade settlements, currency swap agreements, and is engaging in digital currency collaboration initiatives with these countries.
American security guarantees have historically fostered an alignment between the Gulf states and the west. The string of agreements Trump signed with countries there reflects an attempt to draw them away from China and back towards Washington’s orbit.
Countering China
One of the more significant developments from Trump’s trip was an agreement to deepen US technological cooperation with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The US and UAE announced they would work together to construct the largest AI data centre outside of the US in Abu Dhabi.
Technology is one of the key areas where China has been trying to assert its influence in the region. Through Beijing’s so-called “Digital Silk Road” initiative, which aims to develop a global digital ecosystem with China at its centre, Chinese firms have secured deals with Middle Eastern countries to provide 5G mobile network technology.
Chinese tech giants Huawei and Alibaba are also in the process of signing partnerships with telecommunications providers in the region for collaboration and research in cloud computing. These companies have gained traction by aligning closely with national government priorities, such as Saudi Arabia’s initiative to diversify its economy through tech development.
American companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have spent years building regional tech ecosystems across the Gulf. Trump is looking to recover this momentum. He was joined in the Middle East by more than 30 leaders of top American companies, who also secured commercial deals with their peers from the Gulf.
US quantum computing company Quantinuum and Qatari investment firm Al Rabban Capital finalised a joint venture worth up to a US$1 billion. The agreement will see investment in quantum technologies and workforce development in the US and Qatar.
There are two other areas where Trump is trying to cut China off. American companies and Abu Dhabi’s state-run oil firm agreed a US$60 billion energy partnership. China is heavily dependent on the Middle East for energy, with almost half of the oil it uses coming from the region. Greater alignment with the US could hamper Beijing’s ability to secure the resources it needs.
Trump also signed a raft of defence deals with Qatar and Saudi Arabia. These included a US$1 billion deal for Qatar to acquire drone defence technology from American aerospace conglomerate Raytheon RTX, and a US$142 billion agreement for the Saudis to buy military equipment from US firms.
These moves underscore Washington’s intention to limit China’s influence in key defence sectors. China is a key player in the global market for commercial and military drones, providing Saudi Arabia and the UAE with a large share of their combat drones.
One final aspect of Trump’s trip was his brief meeting with Syria’s interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa. Trump signalled possible sanctions relief, which has since come into effect. This constituted more than a diplomatic thaw.
With China positioning itself as a regional mediator and Russia struggling with a diminished role following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the US is looking to reassert itself as the primary power broker in the region.
Dr Maria (Mary) Papageorgiou receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
A major national art exhibition has opened in Stoke-on-Trent as the city celebrates its Centenary year.
Stoke-on-Trent has been chosen as the first place in the UK to host an outdoor exhibition by The National Gallery.
The exhibition has seen 15 famous masterpieces from the world-famous London gallery printed at life-size and installed in Bethesda Gardens, opposite The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.
It is a huge cultural coup for Stoke-on-Trent, and a reflection of its unique cultural heritage. Not only is it a World Craft City but also an Arts Council priority area and one of the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s heritage places.
The National Gallery is one of the most prestigious art galleries in the world, housing a collection of paintings from the late 13th to the early 20th century.
The exhibition in Stoke-on-Trent is part of the Art On Your Doorstep project, which will see villages, towns and cities partner with the gallery to bring a selection of its art to outdoor public spaces for anyone to enjoy without being restricted by opening hours or entry fees.
These will include:
Renaissance Masters such as Caravaggio’s Boy bitten by a Lizard.
The stunning candlelight painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’.
Impressionist legends such as Claude Monet’s The Water-Lily Pond and Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.
JMW Turner’s dramatic Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway in this bicentenary year of the steam-powered locomotive.
The exhibition opens on Wednesday, 4 June and runs until 7, January 2026.
Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent, Councillor Steve Watkins, said: “We’re so proud to be chosen to team up with the world-renowned National Gallery to showcase some of their collection outside in our city during our centenary year.
“Residents will be able to enjoy a relaxing stroll through the beautiful Bethesda Gardens and pause to enjoy work by famous artists.
“Coming face-to-face with a piece of art is the best way to experience it. Art On Your Doorstep is going to open these paintings to such a wide audience.”
The National Gallery: Art On Your Doorstep is organised by Stoke-on-Trent City Council in collaboration with the National Gallery, London.
Devonport has an unprecedented and unrivalled level of long-term security for its work programme following the Government’s announcement that it will build up to 12 more nuclear-powered submarines, Council leader Tudor Evans says.
“The Prime Minister’s announcement in the Strategic Defence Review means Devonport’s work programme is secure until 2070 or 2080, which is incredible given that in years gone by we’ve had to deal with fluctuating workloads and workforce and to fight hard to ensure Plymouth gets it fair share through the Devonport Task Force,” Councillor Evans said.
“I don’t think there is another part of the country that can claim this level of certainty in workloads for decades to come.
“Plymouth is already on the brink of a once-in-a-generation transformation with the £4.4 billion Government investment in Devonport over the next decade and this latest announcement gives us even more impetus to ensure we grasp this opportunity for the whole city and sub-region.
“Now we’ve made the case for Devonport and got the long-term security we need, we have the welcome challenge of filling jobs with workers from the city and across the region, by providing new opportunities to give them the skills to take these jobs and homes for them and their families to live in.”
Devonport is already linchpin in the UK’s defence capabilities, supporting both the surface and submarine fleets and carrying out some of the most complex engineering and infrastructure programmes in the country.
Over the next decade Plymouth will see a surge of investment and development driven by the Government’s investment in Devonport as part of its commitment to the UK’s continuous at sea deterrent.
It is anticipated that Babcock’s Devonport facility will need to recruit 5,500 new employees over the next 10 years—alongside 2,000 construction workers to support its expanding infrastructure programme.
Councillor Evans added: “The numbers are big, which means we need to think big to make sure we grasp the massive opportunities this brings to Plymouth. This is why we have a bold vision for regeneration of the city centre that will see the creation of up to 10,000 new homes and why we have teamed up with Babcock International Group, the Royal Navy, our partners through the Growth Alliance Plymouth (GAP) on a shared mission to ensure the city can support and sustain this scale of growth.
“It is why Homes England have now identified Plymouth as a priority place for investment and are working with us to bring forward a pipeline of thousands of new homes.
“It is also why the creation of a new City College Plymouth campus in the Civic Centre building will be so important in ensuring we can home grow the skills that will be needed at Devonport.”
Major economic study
The City Council, working as part of Growth Alliance Plymouth, has commissioned a major economic study to help the city prepare for the opportunities and challenges arising from an investment programme worth in excess of £4.4 billion at HM Naval Base Devonport and Babcock’s Devonport Royal Dockyard. Read more
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
At the end of May, the festival of technological presentations MIEM Tech Day was held in the atrium of the HSE building on Pokrovsky Boulevard. The event brought together the main educational, research and project tracks Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics named after A.N. Tikhonov (MIEM) HSE, carried out in close cooperation with partners – leading companies, research and financial organizations of Russia.
Engineers at the forefront of science
On this day, the festival guests were treated to an extensive program: a Technoshow from the MIEM project block, a demo Engineering and Mathematical School HSE and VK, consultations on all educational programs of the institute, presentations and stands of partner companies, quizzes, competitions, numerous interactive zones from the festival organizers, companies, student organizations.
The event was attended by students and teachers from HSE and other universities, representatives of MIEM partner companies, IT experts, and schoolchildren.
In their greetings during the short opening ceremony of MIEM Tech Day, the speakers noted the importance of the engineering direction in shaping the modern portrait of the university.
“The Higher School of Economics is a classical university, we have a wide range of areas, including engineering, which is so relevant today,” said Irina Martusevich, Vice-Rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. “MIEM is the heart of engineering at HSE. The university is at the forefront of scientific thought. This is also due to MIEM.”
The general partner of the event was VK.
“For MIEM, cooperation with leading representatives of the industry and business is, first and foremost, a growth point,” emphasized Dmitry Kovalenko, Vice-Rector of HSE and Director of MIEM. “We understand that we will not be able to reach a new level in education and research without our partners, both internal, representing HSE departments and campuses, and external, including VK, the Bank of Russia, the Element Group of Companies, MTS, InfoWatch, EkoNiva, MCST and others. The list is constantly expanding. Today, there are many companies that want to move into a new history, to a new stage of development, together with MIEM.”
Showcase of achievements
A striking example of the established unique joint project-based educational model is the Engineering and Mathematical School of the National Research University Higher School of Economics and VK. The annual demo of the school took place on the main stage of the festival.
“Universities provide a solid academic base, our task is to bring in a practical component by attracting experts, interacting with students, providing cases and the opportunity to work on real projects,” says Georgy Shchelkanov, Director of University Relations at VK. “For three years now, VK, together with the National Research University Higher School of Economics, has been implementing an advanced format of project laboratories: today, students of the IMS workshops are engaged not only in educational projects, but also in applied scientific research and development. This experience allows students to develop key skills and build a career in technology.”
Three workshops, six speakers and hundreds of listeners — the participants presented the final projects prepared during the training. For the first time, the demo was held in an open format; usually such presentations are held only among workshop participants.
“We are holding a demo of the HSE IMS and VK in an expanded format. Last year it took place in the chamber atmosphere of St. Petersburg, and now we have gathered in the atrium on Pokrovka,” explained Fyodor Ivanov, director Center for the organization of work on the project “Advanced Engineering and Mathematical School” HSE University. — I am glad that this event took place. For the workshop participants, studying at IMS is an opportunity to touch real projects, to try themselves in a place where the future of the IT industry is being created. In addition, we invited IMS graduates working at VK to the demo. They shared their experience of building a career track with the audience. As a result, it was a great event, in which there was a lot of communication and exchange of experience, professional and career.”
Among the presented student developments are MLSecOps tools for analyzing vulnerabilities of machine learning models, as well as a system for monitoring the security of ML models and datasets using deduplication.
In the field of speech synthesis, a model for assessing TTS metrics was presented, replacing human expertise with synthetic data, and a zero-shot TTS project with a Russian-language dataset. Attacks on multimodal vision-language models were also investigated, and Russian-language benchmarks were developed to assess their quality.
The main space of the atrium hosted the showroom of the project Technoshow, an annual exhibition of the best project developments by MIEM students. This year, Technoshow was held for the seventh time, but for the first time in the atrium of the main building of the HSE. A total of 60 products of project activity, implemented in close cooperation with MIEM partners, were presented.
Innovations, projects, developments
An important feature of MIEM projects is their practical orientation and the use of modern technological and innovative solutions.
“The IT industry is constantly being replenished with new technologies, this is a continuous process,” noted Ilya Semichasnov, head of Project Development Management Center MIEM. – Now, for example, no one is surprised by LLM programs that talk like a real person, but literally two years ago it was wow. Even if our students demonstrate something that already exists on the market in their developments, under the hood there will still be some innovation, a student invention.”
All student projects presented at the Technoshow were implemented within the framework of the unique project model operating at MIEM, focused on close interaction with the institute’s partners and the reproduction of working models and mechanics used in the work of project teams in leading IT companies. The exhibition featured partner projects with VK, the Bank of Russia, Element Group, InfoWatch Group, EkoNiva and other companies. In many ways, it is this advantage of the project environment at MIEM that allows large technology companies not only to apply their own educational practices when implementing joint projects with MIEM, but also to consider the institute as an experimental platform for testing new models of project-educational cooperation with universities.
“Our group of companies is currently a leader in the microelectronics industry, and we recognize our significant social responsibility, the need for the entire industry to develop methods for training personnel,” said Nail Vyalshin, head of education at Element Group. “In this sense, MIEM is of great importance to us: we plan to use it as a basis for building such an innovative mechanism for implementing our educational programs, including network programs, when the institute houses the head center of expertise and competencies. We plan to further broadcast this new model in the field of higher education in microelectronics when implementing educational programs at other universities.”
The key areas of project presentations were defined: a digital university with innovative educational solutions, games and interactive applications with a focus on game design, robots and gadgets with autonomous technologies, industrial technologies for production automation, business solutions and startups based on artificial intelligence, information security solutions (from antifraud to AI protection), medical technologies for improving diagnostics, space with satellite systems, video technologies using AI, as well as clusters of projects from the joint Engineering and Mathematics School of the Higher School of Economics and VK and the MIEM Student Design Bureau with applied hardware and software projects, Center for Software Development and Digital Services with IT and IB services. As a result, MIEM’s design developments filled the entire space of the largest HSE site.
“This is the first time that MIEM has presented itself so widely at Pokrovka,” said Veronika Prokhorova, Deputy Director of MIEM HSE. “It’s great that there are so many interested parties today. Students, teachers, and staff come up to us, ask questions, and are interested. For us, Technoshow and MIEM Tech Day are the tip of the iceberg. Today, we have gathered here the very best of what we do throughout the year. We are finally bringing it to the public and saying, ‘Guys, take a look and rejoice with us. We are great.’”
Most of the developments presented at Technoshow are of an applied nature. Evgeny Kruk, scientific director of MIEM, notes the importance of applied sciences for introducing students to scientific research activities: “Our projects have a lot of applied science, and this is the right track for students focused on research work. A project is an entry into applied science, and applied science is the entry into fundamental science. And there is a gigantic field for discoveries.”
The festival partners shared their impressions of the joint projects presented at Technoshow.
“Today, milk production and agriculture in general are no longer just a plough and shovels, they are artificial intelligence, they are cutting-edge technologies that need to be implemented. In this regard, cooperation with the Higher School of Economics is a priority for us,” shared Anastasia Ornova, manager for work with the personnel reserve of the EkoNiva agricultural holding. “We have several joint projects. For example, a project on soybean phenotyping, the purpose of which is to conduct research in the field. Another project is aimed at analyzing logistics in the supply of raw milk from the agro-complex to the plant. In the near future, we are planning to hold the first joint hackathon with the National Research University Higher School of Economics.”
“The event featured student projects, including those prepared by master’s students of the joint program with the Bank of Russia, “Information Security in the Credit and Financial Sphere,” says Elena Stavitskaya, consultant of the Department of Financial Cyber Literacy and Educational Initiatives of the Department of Methodology and Standardization of Information Security and Cyber Resilience of the Information Security Department of the Bank of Russia. “Some of the work is theoretical in nature, while others were presented in the form of implemented applied models. I would like to note the seriousness, depth, and, undoubtedly, practical nature of the projects, their focus on solving socially significant problems.”
Thus, a joint project with the Information Security Department of the Bank of Russia offered everyone who wanted to deceive (almost always unsuccessfully) the protected algorithm of biometric identification by photo created at MIEM. Another project with the Bank of Russia presented a method for comparing countries by the level of fraud pressure, allowing to evaluate the success of the work of the structures interested in this.
The festival also included an informal open day at MIEM HSE, as all of MIEM’s bachelor’s, specialist’s and master’s degree programs were presented in a separate area.
In addition, the festival guests were treated not only to a scientific and educational program, but also to a variety of entertainment activities for relaxation and communication, including bingo with the opportunity to win merch from MIEM and IMS, areas for bead weaving and playing chess, as well as an area with anti-stress coloring books.
The guests were also greatly interested in the stands and activities of partner companies and MIEM student communities – the MIEM Student Scientific and Technical Society and the MIEM Student Design Bureau.
“MIEM Tech Day is not only an exhibition of the best technological products, but also a platform for exchanging experience,” emphasized Karina Lebedeva, consultant of the financial market training department of the Department for the Development of New Technologies in Education of the Bank of Russia. “In addition to student projects, the event featured presentations of the best cases of MIEM HSE partners. The stands of partners deserve special attention, where a large number of necessary handouts were presented. Thank you for the high level of organization of the event and the opportunity to literally touch student developments.”
As a result, the day was filled with an atmosphere of friendly professional communication among all participants of the event – students, professionals, and those simply interested in the development of modern technologies and IT engineering.
“What is MIEM Tech Day for me? First of all, it is people, student communities, teams, those who create the atmosphere of the event. Secondly, it is innovation, and thirdly, it is fun, because it is really fun here, it is fun to look at it, it is fun to touch it all. This is a very cool event! Finally, it is the team that organized this wonderful holiday,” concluded Ilya Semichasnov.
Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.
Officers are appealing for assistance to help find 33-year-old Portia Vincent-Kirby, who is missing from Finchley.
Portia was last seen on Friday, 21 February at around 20:45hrs in Hyde Park. After leaving her friends, she is believed to have gone to Victoria Station.
She was reported missing to police on Thursday, 13 March.
Officers have been trawling CCTV footage in a bid to trace her movements, with the last confirmed sighting placing her at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel on Wednesday, 14 May.
Portia’s mum, Janina, said:
“We are all very worried as Portia is very vulnerable. Portia has not been in contact with or seen by any family or friends since February.
“We appeal to the public for anyone to please come forward if they know anything about her or her whereabouts. We also appeal to Portia directly, please get in touch with any of your family or friends.”
PC Harjinder Kang, from the Met’s north west missing persons unit, added:
“We are growing increasingly concerned for Portia’s safety, as this behaviour is out of character for her. We urge anyone who may have seen her to contact police.
“Officers have been carrying out a number of enquiries in an effort to trace her and we are now turning to the public for help. Please get in touch if you can help us locate Portia.”
Portia is slim with blue eyes and shoulder-length dyed blonde hair. Her clothing when she went missing is unknown, however she often wears a baseball cap.
She is also known to have links with the Kent area.
Police would urge anyone with information on her whereabouts to call police on 101 or anonymously via Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, quoting 01/7262039/25.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marcel Plichta, PhD Candidate in the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews
Russia launched its largest single drone attack of the war against Ukraine’s cities on June 1. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that they faced 472 unmanned one-way attack (OWA) drones overnight.
The record may not stand for long. The prior record was on May 26, when Moscow launched some 355 drones. The day before Russia had set a record with 298 Shaheds, which itself surpassed the May 18 tally.
Russia’s enormous OWA drone attacks came as a surprise to politicians and the general public, but it’s the culmination of years of work by the Russia military. Initially purchased from Iran, Russia began building factories in 2023 to assemble and then manufacture Shaheds (Iranian-designed unmanned drones) in Russia. Greater control over production gave Russia the opportunity to expand the number of Shaheds quickly.
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It also helps them gradually upgrade their drones. Investigations into downed Shaheds show that Russia has been coating the drones in carbon, which resists detection by radar by absorbing incoming waves instead of reflecting them back. They have also been adding SIM cards to transmit data back to Russia through mobile networks.
Shaheds also had their warheads upgraded. On May 20 the Ukrainian media reported that Shaheds were using newer incendiary and fragmentation warheads which start fires and spread large volumes of shrapnel respectively to increase their effectiveness.
Russia hit Kyiv with its biggest ever drone strike a few days ago.
These upgrades were simple in order to keep the cost of the drone, its major advantage over a missile, under control. These drones are both inexpensive and long-range.
This means that an attacker such as Russia can launch hundreds every month at targets across Ukraine with little concern about how many are lost along the way. Meanwhile, the defender is stuck figuring out how to shoot all incoming drones down at a reasonable cost indefinitely.
The problem is made even more complicated by the fact that air defence systems are sorely needed at the front line to shoot down hostile aircraft, making it a difficult trade-off.
Adding to the problem is the recent production of decoy Shaheds. While they carry no warhead and pose little threat by themselves, Ukrainian air defence cannot always tell the decoy from the real thing and still need to shoot them down. In late May, Ukrainian officials told the media that up to 40% of incoming Shaheds were decoys.
Consequently, Russia’s 472-drone attack reflects all of Russia’s innovations so far. These have improved the number of drones that survive, increased lethality, while using decoys alongside armed drones to ensure as many as possible reach their target.
What are the challenges for Ukraine?
Ukraine shoots most incoming Shaheds down. Even the 472-drone attack still had 382 claimed interceptions, a rate of 81%. However, the relatively high interception rate disguises the Shahed’s benefits for Russia.
Shaheds are cheap by military standards, so launching constant attacks is a disproportionate burden for Ukrainian air defence units. Kyiv has mobilised an enormous amount of resources to protect its cities, from mobile units in trucks to counter-Shahed drones that function like a cheaper anti-aircraft missile.
That said, these systems often have short ranges, which means that the savings per interception are somewhat offset by the need to maintain many hundreds of systems across a country as large as Ukraine. Ukraine also has the option of trying to strike Russia’s Shahed factories, which they have attempted a few times.
Despite Ukraine’s evolving air defence, Russia still sees military benefits to constant Shahed attacks. In a study I contributed to last year, we found that Russia’s initial OWA drone strategy in 2022 and 2023 did little to force Ukraine to negotiate an end to the war on terms favourable to Russia.
That may still be the case now, but the volume of drones and the high tempo of attacks means that Russian strategy could well be aimed at systematically exhausting Ukrainian air defence.
As Ukraine grapples with unpredictable US military support, Kyiv is more vulnerable to running out of ammunition for its more advanced air defence systems. This means that constant Shahed attacks make it more difficult for Ukraine to stop incoming missiles, which carry much larger warheads.
Ukraine’s drone strike this week.
Of course, Ukraine has its own versions of the Shahed, which it uses to routinely launch strikes against Russian military and oil facilities. Less is known about Ukraine’s OWA drones, but they often use many similar features to Shaheds such as satellite navigation.
For Russia’s Vladimir Putin, using Shaheds is not all about military benefit. Politically, he has increasingly used Shahed attacks to project a sense of power to his domestic audiences. On May 9, Russia paraded Shaheds through Moscow’s streets as part of its annual Victory Day celebrations, which had not been done in years past.
Ukraine has begun employing its own OWA drones as part of the “Spiderweb” operation to attack military and oil infrastructure across Russia.
Russia’s 472-drone attack is unlikely to remain its largest attack for long. Putin has shown a determination to expand the scale and tempo of its drone campaign and resist Ukaine’s calls for a permanent “ceasefire in the sky”, but this week Ukraine’s drone strategy has shown that prolonging the drone war can also have serious and unexpected effects for Moscow.
So long as the conflict continues, Ukraine’s defenders will find themselves facing more, and better, drones aimed at their cities. But increasingly it looks like Russia must worry about Ukraine’s drone capabilities too.
Marcel Plichta works for Grey Dynamics Ltd. as an intelligence instructor.
Damien Hirst is never far from scandal. Perhaps best known for immersing animal corpses into formaldehyde and selling them as art, the “enfant terrible” of the 1990s Young British Artists (YBA) movement seems to court controversy for a living – and has made an extraordinary amount of money in the process. Reputedly worth around £700 million, this working-class lad “easily” topped a recent list of the world’s richest artists.
Money is at the root of a lot of the questions that hover around Hirst’s legacy to the art world as he reaches his 60th birthday. Few artists have stress-tested the question of artistic value (and price) more than him – not least in his 2007 work For The Love of God: a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with thousands of flawless diamonds.
Last year, Hirst’s money-related motives were called into question again in an investigation by the Guardian which revealed he had backdated three formaldehyde sculptures to the 1990s when they were, in fact, made in 2017. The report also found he had backdated some of the 10,000 original spot paintings from his NFT project The Currency to 2016, despite them being made between 2018 and 2019.
Hirst’s company, Science Ltd, defended the artist by reminding critics that his art is conceptual – and that he has always been clear that what matters is “not the physical making of the object or the renewal of its parts, but rather the intention and the idea behind the artwork”. His lawyers pointed out:
The dating of artworks, and particularly conceptual artworks, is not controlled by any industry standard. Artists are perfectly entitled to be (and often are) inconsistent in their dating of works.
But some of the art world did not respond kindly to this approach. Writing about Hirst’s “backdating scandal”, New York’s Rehs Galleries asked not only if Hirst could be sued by buyers and investors, but whether he was in creative decline. And Jones accused Hirst of being stuck in the past, calling the Guardian’s findings a “betrayal” for the artist’s admirers which could “threaten to poison Hirst’s whole artistic biography”.
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Ever since Hirst burst on the art scene in the 1990s with his macabre readymades (or “objets trouvé”) of dead animals in vitrines, he has divided art critics and the public alike. He has faced – and denied – multiple allegations of plagiarism and been censored by animal rights activists, while also being acclaimed as a “genius” and one of the leading global artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Amid all the eye-watering auction sales, he has donatedartworks to numerous charities throughout his career.
So, was the backdating incident another instance of Hirst mastering the art of the concept – and even offering a sly critique of consumerism and the art world machine, of which he is such a large cog? Or was it really just a big lie by a multi-millionaire artist seeking even more financial gain?
As philosophers of art, we think our discipline can shed light on these complex questions by exploring the nature of conceptual art, aesthetic deception and the ethics of the art market. As we contemplate the legacy of Hirst at 60, we ask: must artists always be truthful?
What only the best art can attain
Hirst had a humble upbringing. Born in the English port city of Bristol in 1959, he was raised in Leeds by his Irish mother, who encouraged him to draw. He never met his father and got in trouble with the police on a few occasions in his youth. His early artistic education was rocky too: he got a grade E in art A-Level and was rejected a handful of times by art schools.
But as a teenager, he had fallen in love with Francis Bacon’s paintings, later explaining that he admired their visceral expressions of the horror of the fragile body, and that he “went into sculpture directly in reaction … to Bacon’s work”. Hirst would also use his work experience in a morgue to hone his anatomical drawing skills.
His love of conceptual art blossomed when he began studying fine art at London’s Goldsmiths University in 1986 – taught by art world legends such as Michael Craig-Martin and catching the attention of collector and businessman Charles Saatchi. Craig-Martin had risen to fame for his conceptual artwork An Oak tree (1973), consisting of a glass of water on a pristine shelf with a text asserting that the glass was, in fact, an oak tree. Hirst has described this artwork as “the greatest piece of conceptual sculpture – I still can’t get it out of my head”.
Hirst’s fascination with death culminated in his most notorious work of art, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) – a dead tiger shark, caught off the coast of Queensland in Australia, preserved in formaldehyde in a glass vitrine.
We encountered the work, separately and ten years apart, in London and New York. We both felt inclined to dislike and dismiss it. Instead, we were simply overwhelmed. By forcing us to stare death in the face, literally, the work put everything on its edge – awe-inspiring and horrifying, life-affirming and fatal, in your face yet somehow apart and absent.
Like it or not, Hirst’s shark achieved what only the best art can: jolting us out of our everyday registers – making us confront mortality, the value of life, and the human condition.
Video: Khan Academy.
Not everyone agreed, of course. After it was exhibited in the first YBA show at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992, there was a swarm of hate. According to the Stuckist Art Group (an anti-conceptual art movement), a dead shark isn’t art. Of Hirst’s entire oeuvre, the group’s co-founders have said: “They’re bright and they’re zany – but there’s fuck all there at the end of the day.”
After Hirst won the Turner Prize in 1995 for Mother and Child, Divided (a bisected cow and calf in glass tanks) Conservative politician Norman Tebbit asked whether the art world had “gone stark raving mad”. Art critic Brian Sewell exclaimed that Hirst’s work is “no more interesting than a stuffed pike over a pub door”.
But Hirst never seemed to care about such criticism as he tackled controversial themes ranging from death, science and religion to the unrelenting power of capitalism. Along the way, he has used his power to criticise the very art world of which he forms such an important part, and from which he has gained such enormous riches.
You might say his art reached a logical endpoint with The Currency in 2021 – a conceptual experiment in which 10,000 unique, hand-painted spot paintings were reduced to money itself, as they corresponded to 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Buyers were given the choice of keeping either the physical or the digital version, while the other would be destroyed. Speaking to the actor and art enthusiast Stephen Fry, Hirst said of these paintings:
What if I made these and treated them like money? … I’ve never really understood money. All these things – art, money, commerce – they’re all ethereal. It relies not on notebooks or pieces of paper but belief, trust.
How Hirst makes his art
It’s not just what Hirst’s art supposedly means that sometimes rocks the boat, but how he makes it.
While he began his career by personally making and manipulating his chosen artistic materials – from paint and canvas to flies and maggots – he now unapologetically relies on a studio populated by numerous assistants to produce the works that bear his name. It is largely these studio workers who pour the paint on spinning canvases, handle the formaldehyde, construct the glass boxes, and source the dead animals.
Hirst has fully endorsed the conceptual artist’s mantra of “the art is the idea”. If the artwork is the idea rather than the material object, then it should suffice merely for the artist to think or conceptualise the objects for them to count as his works of art. According to this perspective, exactly who makes the objects which are exhibited, sold and debated in the media is entirely unimportant.
But to some, this adds to the ways in which they feel deceived or “had” by Hirst. After all, at least in the western artistic tradition, the connection between artist and artwork has for hundreds of years been considered unique, sacred even. If an artist doesn’t actually make the art any more, to what extent can they really be said to be an artist at all?
Except that, in this respect, Hirst is not particularly unusual. Outsourcing the physical act of making an artwork is almost standard among contemporary artists such as Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread and Jeff Koons – all of whom have long relied on trainee artists, engineers, architects, constructors and more to build their large structural works.
And while Andy Warhol was the trendsetter in this regard from the early 1960s – calling his studio The Factory for its assembly line-style of production – the practice predates even him by hundreds of years. The great masters of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, having acquired sufficient fame and fortune, were rarely the sole creators of their masterpieces.
The 17th-century Flemish artist Rubens, for example, would often leave the painting of less central or prominent features in his works to his studio assistants – many of whom, including Anthony van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens, went on to highly successful artistic careers of their own. Even 14-year-old Leonardo da Vinci started out as a studio apprentice in the workshop of the Italian sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio.
Unlike Rubens, however, Hirst now only rarely makes any kind of material contribution to his works, beyond adding his signature. The Currency series involved Hirst merely adding a watermark and signature to the thousands of handmade spot paintings.
Video: HENI.
Also, Hirst’s works make no formal recognition of this studio input, whereas for Rubens, the arrangement was fairly transparent. Indeed, the division of labour was sometimes even negotiated with the painting’s buyer – the more a buyer was willing to pay, the more Rubens would paint himself.
But Hirst makes no secret of his lack of physical involvement in the material process, explaining:
You have to look at it as if the artist is an architect – we don’t have a problem that great architects don’t actually build the houses … Every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand and my heart.
Hirst’s social media pages often show the artist arriving at his studio while his team are busy at work. And clearly, not all potential buyers care about his “hands-off approach” – a large part of what they value is, precisely, the signature. In 2020, Hirst told The Idler magazine’s editor Tom Hodgkinson:
If I couldn’t delegate, I wouldn’t make any work … If I want to paint a spot painting but don’t know how I want it to look, I can go to an assistant … When they ask how you want it to look, you can say: ‘I don’t know, just do it.’ It gives you something to kick against or work against.
In the past decade, though, Hirst says he has scaled back his studio, admitting his art life felt like it was out of control:
You start by thinking you’ll get one assistant and before you know it, you’ve got biographers, fire eaters, jugglers, fucking minstrels and lyre players all wandering around.
The product of a specific place and time
Hirst disrupts our beliefs about art to an extent matched by few of his contemporaries. Always in the business of fragmenting the already vague expectations of the art market – and wider general public – he continues the trajectory outlined by fellow experimental conceptual artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth and Yoko Ono – now well over 50 years ago.
When the making of art moves into this level of abstraction, a historical fact like the precise inception date seems harder to pin down – and it becomes much less clear which aspects of the creative process should determine when the work was “made”.
Of course, the same question arises outside the confines of this artistic genre. How should we deal with performative arts such as theatre, jazz or opera? Is it all that important to date John Coltrane’s Blue Train to its first recording in 1957, rather than any of the other dates on which the American jazz legend performed it? Surely some aesthetic and artistic qualities are added on each occasion?
However, art in general, be it Blue Train or one of Hirst’s spot paintings, is always the product of a specific place and time. It is undoubtedly a significant fact about Hirst’s Cain and Abel (1994) – one of the artworks highlighted by the Guardian misdating investigation – that it was “made” in the YBA boom of the 1990s.
Can we engage with these pieces without bringing knowledge of this fact into our experience of them? Yes. Can we grasp at least some of their wider meaning? Almost certainly. But can we fully appreciate them as cultural objects – defining a precise moment in the evolution of art and society at large, perhaps foreseeing a certain shift in our larger value systems including what art means to us? Maybe not.
But there is another possibility we need to consider – one that touches on the worries of some of Hirst’s critics. What if Hirst intentionally misled the public for financial and commercial gain, and that the dating debacle has nothing to do with his cunning conceptual practice?
Jon Sharples, senior associate at London-based law firm Howard Kennedy – one of the first UK practices to advise on art and cultural property law – observed a few reasons why an artist might deliberately fudge or mislead on the origin of their art:
The potential for commercial pressure to do so is obvious. If works from a certain period achieve higher market prices than works from other periods, there is a clear incentive to increase the supply of such works to meet the demand for them.
Another reason Sharples offered is an art-historical one – to make the artist appear more radical: “In the linear, western conception of art history – in which ‘originality’ is often elevated above all other artistic virtues, and great store is placed in being the ‘first’ artist to arrive at a particular development – artists have sometimes been given to tampering with the historical record.”
Here, Sharples referenced the famous example of “the father of abstraction”, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, backdating the first version of his Black Square by two years.
So, has Hirst just told a big fib about the origins of some of his art?
Philosophers largely agree that lying involves asserting something you believe to be untrue; speaking seriously but not telling the truth. And most of the time, we all assume that people around us abide by the norm that everyone ought to speak truthfully to each other. If we didn’t believe this, we would barely be able to communicate with one another. Lying involves violating this “truth norm”.
Yet, the case of art seems to stand in stark contrast to this. When we ask whether an artist has lied as part of their artistic practice, it is often not clear that there is a straightforward truth norm in the art world to be violated: it’s not clear that the artist is speaking ‘seriously’ in the first place.
I (Daisy) have researched in depth the reasons why lying in the art world is such a tricky business. In many exhibitions, it is the aesthetic experience that is of primary value. If what matters is creating beauty, then straightforward truth is not the point.
Moreover, even in cases where the art is designed to convey a specific message, it’s tricky to say in what sense they ought to tell “the truth”. Many artworks represent fictional scenarios which needn’t be fully accurate.
For instance, it was quite acceptable in the 16th century for painters of religious paintings to give central biblical figures inaccurate clothing – and for portrait artists not to paint their sitter’s flaws and blemishes. And in the perplexing art world of the 21st century, many post-1960 artforms are designed to challenge and critique the very nature of truth itself.
All of which means straightforward “truth games” do not operate as smoothly in the art world as they do in the ordinary world. With its self-reflective and self-critical structure, the art world of today offers a space to think open-endedly and creatively. Do you expect everything you see in an art gallery, or even speeches by conceptual artists, to be straightforwardly “true”? We don’t think so.
The art world is hardly renowned for its straightforwardly communicated messages. To accuse Hirst of lying assumes he is playing the truth game that the rest of us are signed up to in the first place. And it’s not clear he is.
Hirst might be closer to a novelist or actor who plays with and explores the very nature of truth and falsehood. In this way, he’s maybe at most a “bullshitter” who doesn’t play – or care for – the truth game at all.
The real problem?
But this fascination with Hirst’s dating practices may overlook the more important – if equally complex – problem of how his art works were made, rather than when. Are the ethical concerns about the production of Hirst’s enormous oeuvre the real issue in assessing his legacy as an artist?
For instance, Hirst has been criticised for treating his staff as “disposable”. During the peak of the COVID pandemic, he laid off 63 of his studio assistants even though his company had reportedly received £15 million of emergency loans from the UK government.
And while Hirst’s lawyers insist his studios always adhere to health-and-safety regulations, some of the “factory line” workers producing artworks for The Currency were allegedly left with repetitive strain injuries. One artist described their year-long toil as “very, very tedious”. Another commented on the work tables being at a low level, forcing them to constantly bend down.
Hirst has publicly praised assistants such as the artist Rachel Howard, who he described as “the best person who ever painted spots for me”. Likewise, Howard described working with Hirst as “a very good symbiotic” relationship.
Hirst is famous for exhibiting slain animals … and for the use of thousands of butterflies whose wings are torn and glued on various objects. Death and the taste of the macabre serve to attract attention. Then wealthy collectors such as Saatchi and even the prestigious Sotheby’s artificially inflate the prices of Hirst’s junk. It’s a squalid commercial operation based on death and contempt for living and sentient beings.
Video: Channel 4 News.
Indeed, some of Hirst’s macabre formaldehyde pieces are known for rotting a little too much. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living originally deteriorated due to an improper preservation technique, and had to be replaced by another shark caught off the same Australian coast. It’s not clear how many sharks have now been killed – or will need to be killed in the future – to preserve this masterpiece.
Further concerns have been raised about the environmental ethics of Hirst’s art, including that The Currency project incurred a hefty carbon footprint because of its reliance on blockchain technology. While Hirst used a more environmentally-friendly sidechain to release his NFTs, he still received payment via bitcoin, which has a far higher energy consumption.
Traditionally, art historians, critics and investors have championed an artwork’s meaning over any of its moral flaws in its production. But the ethics of artmaking are now being questioned by philosophers such as ourselves, as well as by many influential figures in the art world. Artworks that incur large carbon footprints, cause damage to ecosystems, or use and kill animals, are now considered morally flawed in these ways.
Philosophers such as Ted Nannicelli argue that these ethical defects can actually diminish the artistic value of the work of art. Meanwhile, artists such as Angela Singer and Ben Rubin and Jen Thorp use their art for animal and eco-activism, while doing no harm to creatures or the ecosystem in the process.
As we both acknowledge, Hirst’s shark expressed a laudable meaning in an arresting way. But is this enough to excuse the (repeated) killing of this awesome animal? Do we become complicit in its death by praising it as art? It is a question anybody who was impressed by its sheer aesthetic presence all those years ago should ask themselves.
In this and many other ways, Hirst’s work continues to raise fundamental questions about art – long after it was created, or dated. If nothing else, surely this confirms his enduring position in the British art establishment.
Damien Hirst’s representatives were contacted about the criticisms of Hirst that are highlighted in this article, but they did not respond by the time of publication.
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Elisabeth Schellekens has received funding from Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Funding Council) as Principal Investigator for research into Aesthetic Perception and Aesthetic Cognition (2019-22), and an AHRC Innovation Award on Perception and Conceptual Art with Peter Goldie (2003).
Daisy Dixon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Labour government is on the wrong side of history and it has Palestinian blood on its hands
More in External Affairs
Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman joined protesters outside the UK Government offices in Edinburgh as part of the Red Line for Gaza demonstration, calling for an immediate end to arms sales to Israel and demanding accountability for the UK’s role in the ongoing violence against Palestinians.
The protest coincides with Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, with catastrophic impacts on civilians.
The UK Government is currently facing a judicial review in the High Court challenging their continued supply of F-35 parts in arms exports used by Israel. Despite mounting evidence the Government lawyer’s have argued no violation of the duty to prevent genocide “can occur unless and until there is actually a genocide”.
European countries such as Spain, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy have suspended arms sales to Israel, however, the UK Government continues to fight the case as aircraft continue to bomb Gaza.
“Gaza has been turned into rubble – hospitals, schools, homes – all destroyed. Over 90% of housing has been wiped out. Families are being displaced and forced into camps with no food, water or shelter. This is not just a humanitarian crisis – it’s a moral catastrophe and the UK Government is helping it happen. The UK Government is complicit.
“It’s shameful that the UK refuses to act. Instead of standing up for peace, the Prime Minister came to Scotland to announce more money for war. Keir Starmer’s expects yet more UK tax money to feed the war machine and his government’s denial of genocide shows he’s more interested in retaining power than defending human rights. This Labour government is on the wrong side of history and it has Palestinian blood on its hands.
“The UK Government is currently defending its position in a high court case, claiming there’s “no evidence” of genocide or intentional targeting of civilians in Gaza. It doesn’t require much thought to reject that argument outright: this genocide is being live-streamed for all to see. We’ve all seen the videos. We’ve seen the bodies. The world knows what’s happening in Gaza – the destruction, the killing of women and children. For the UK Government to say there’s no evidence is not only dishonest – it’s dangerous.
“The Scottish Greens know that genuine security doesn’t come at the end of a gun or aftermath of a bomb. It comes from investing in healthcare, affordable housing and a green economy built on sustainability and compassion.
“We have consistently called for an immediate end to arms sales to Israel, full transparency over any UK or indeed Scottish Government funding linked to Israeli military production, an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, recognition of the State of Palestine, and Israel’s suspension from international bodies, including the United Nations, until compliance with international law is restored.
“Together, outside the UK Government offices, we gathered in protest but we also gathered in hope. Hope for the Palestinian people and hope for humanity.”
nited Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced today the appointment of Major General Diodato Abagnara of Italy as Head of Mission and Force Commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
Major General Abagnara succeeds Lieutenant General Aroldo Lázaro Sáenz of Spain. The Secretary-General extends his sincere gratitude to Lieutenant General Aroldo Lázaro Sáenz for his dedication and leadership of UNIFIL during one of the mission’s most challenging periods.
Major General Abagnara brings to the position over 36 years of military service, including extensive leadership roles within the Italian Armed Forces. Most recently, he served as Commander and Chair of the Military Technical Committee for Lebanon (MTC4L), where he oversaw multinational coordination efforts in support of the Lebanese Armed Forces. Prior to that, he held several key appointments, including Personnel Division Chief and Adviser to the Chief of Defence Staff in the Defence General Staff, Commander of an infantry brigade, and Chief of the Officers’ Employment Office. From 2018 to 2019, he was also UNIFIL Sector West Commander. In addition, he chaired the Joint Gender Perspective Council within the Defence General Staff, underscoring his commitment to inclusive leadership and institutional reform.
Major General Abagnara holds four Bachelor’s degrees: in Political Science from the University of Turin; in International and Diplomatic Sciences from the University of Trieste; in Business Management and Communication from the University of Teramo; and in Strategic Sciences from the University of Turin, all in Italy. He also holds six Master’s degrees: in Law from the University of Rome; in Strategic Sciences from the University of Turin; in International Strategic-Military Studies, Advanced Studies in Intelligence and Security, and Cybersecurity and Information Security from the University of Rome; and in Strategic Leadership and Digital Transformation from the Luiss Business School, Rome, all in Italy. He is fluent in English and Italian, and speaks French and Spanish.
The diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis among women ages 12–54 years in the seven major markets (7MM*) are set to register an annual growth rate (AGR) of 0.09% from 2.77 million in 2024 to 2.8 million in 2034, forecasts GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.
GlobalData’s latest report, “Endometriosis – Epidemiology Forecast to 2034,” reveals that the US will have the highest number of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis among the 7MM at 1.51 million cases, whereas Japan will have the lowest number at 0.09 million cases in 2034.
Antara Bhattacharya, Associate Project Manager, Epidemiology team at GlobalData, comments: “In 2024, women in ages 30–54 years accounted for almost 92% of the diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis in the 7MM, while younger women in ages 12–29 years accounted for approximately 8% of the cases.”
GlobalData estimates that in 2024, approximately 64% of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis in the 7MM were laparoscopy confirmed, whereas 36% of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis suspected cases. In 2024, approximately 28% of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis were in stage IV, whereas 22% of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis were in stage I.
In the 7MM, approximately 44% of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis were superficial peritoneal endometriosis, whereas 19% of diagnosed prevalent cases were deep infiltrating endometriosis in 2024. Approximately 44% of diagnosed prevalent cases of endometriosis were with dysmenorrhea.
Bhattacharya concludes: “Endometriosis significantly impacts quality of life among women of reproductive age due to pain, fatigue, and other symptoms that can affect daily activities, work productivity, and relationships. This may further lead to psychological consequences. Diagnostic delay, limited capacity of health systems, and sub-optimal access to specialized surgery such as laparoscopy further exacerbate the condition, since prompt access to available treatment methods, including non-steroidal analgesics, progestin-based contraceptives, is often not achieved.
“Addressing endometriosis through various treatments and supportive care can help improve the quality of life for those affected. Additionally, capacity development of primary healthcare providers is essential to initiate treatment for patients who could benefit from medical symptomatic management.”
*7MM: The US, 5EU (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK), and Japan.
Headline: Microsoft launches new European security initiative
As AI and digital technologies advance, the European cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, presenting new challenges that require stronger partnerships and enhanced solutions. Ransomware groups and state-sponsored actors from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea continue to grow in scope and sophistication, and European cyber protection cannot afford to stand still.
That is why, today, in Berlin, we are announcing a new Microsoft initiative to expand our longstanding work to help defend Europe’s cybersecurity. Implementing one of the five European Digital Commitments I shared in Brussels five weeks ago, we are launching a new European Security Program that adds to the company’s longstanding global Government Security Program.
This new program expands the geographic reach of our existing work and adds new elements that will become critical to Europe’s protection. It puts AI at the center of our work as a tool to protect traditional cybersecurity needs and strengthens our protection of digital and AI infrastructure.
We are launching the European Security Program with three new elements:
Increasing AI-based threat intelligence sharing with European governments;
Making additional investments to strengthen cybersecurity capacity and resilience; and
Expanding our partnerships to disrupt cyberattacks and dismantle the networks cybercriminals use.
We are making this program available to European governments, free of charge, including all 27 European Union (EU) member states, as well as EU accession countries, members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), the UK, Monaco, and the Vatican.
Together, these efforts reflect Microsoft’s long-term commitment to defending Europe’s digital ecosystem—ensuring that, no matter how the threat landscape evolves, we will remain a trusted and steadfast partner to Europe in securing its digital future.
The need for new steps – the current threat environment
Microsoft continues to observe persistent threat activity targeting European networks from nation state actors, with Russian and Chinese activity being particularly prolific in Europe. Unsurprisingly, Russia continues to be especially focused on targets in Ukraine and European nations providing support to Ukraine. Nation-state actors, including those engaging in malicious activity from Iran and North Korea, are predominantly pursuing espionage objectives in Europe through credential theft or the exploitation of vulnerabilities to gain access to corporate and government networks. Several campaigns, including those from China, have also targeted academic institutions, compromising accounts to access sensitive research data or conduct geopolitical espionage against think tanks. Cybercriminals continue to develop Ransomware-as-a-Service beyond nation-state threats. We have seen the emergence of illicit websites rapidly gaining followings by leaking ransomware insights to be used by criminal groups to conduct attacks across Europe.
The rise of AI is also augmenting and evolving threat actor behavior. Microsoft has observed AI use by threat actors for reconnaissance, vulnerability research, translation, LLM-refined operational command techniques, resource development, scripting techniques, detection evasion, social engineering, and brute force attacks. This is why Microsoft now tracks any malicious use of new AI models we release and proactively prevents known threat actors from using our AI products. This also underscores the importance of secure development and rigorous testing of AI models, leveraging AI to benefit cyber defenders, and close public-private partnerships to share the latest insights about AI and cybersecurity.
Increasing AI-based threat intelligence sharing with governments
Microsoft’s Government Security Program (GSP) has long provided governments with confidential security information and resources to help them better understand our products and the evolving threat landscape, particularly threats from nation-state actors. Building on existing efforts, our new European Security Program will increase the flow and expand access to actionable threat intelligence to European governments. Tailored to discrete national threat environments using AI insights, and delivered, when possible, in real time, this program is designed to help governments stay ahead of advancing cyber threats through:
Leveraging threat intelligence insights – Microsoft tracks the most sophisticated nation-state cyber activity, offering timely insights into evolving global threats. We use AI to support our analysis, which has improved our visibility and accelerated our ability to share the latest intelligence on the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by advanced persistent threat actors, including the malicious use of AI. By providing more information and faster, Microsoft will help European governments strengthen their cyber resilience and enable proactive defense.
Expanding cybercrime reporting – The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) plays a critical role in detecting and disrupting global cybercriminal infrastructure, generating invaluable real-time intelligence in the process. As part of this new effort, we are expanding the availability of this intelligence to trusted European partners to support rapid response and coordinated enforcement action through the Cybercrime Threat Intelligence Program (CTIP).
Providing foreign influence operations updates – The Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) continues to monitor influence operations in Europe, which are increasingly using AI to mislead and deceive with deepfake synthetic media. MTAC also uses AI to look for commonalities across operations and will provide regular intelligence briefings on foreign influence, offering timely insights into the tactics, narratives, and digital platforms leveraged by state-affiliated actors. These briefings help policymakers and security stakeholders stay ahead of evolving disinformation campaigns and hybrid threats targeting democratic institutions and public trust.
Identifying vulnerabilities and prioritizing security communications – Microsoft is committed to proactive and transparent security communications, particularly in the face of emerging threats and evolving vulnerabilities. We provide customers with timely, actionable intelligence through structured programs such as the Threat Microsoft Security Update Guide, Vulnerability Reporting process, and Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management. As part of this expanded commitment, we will offer prioritized notice of security communications, including vulnerability remediation guidance to our European Security Program partners, helping to enhance situational awareness and enabling faster responses.
Participating governments will have a dedicated Microsoft point of contact to coordinate responses and escalate concerns. These efforts are designed to improve situational awareness and to support faster, more coordinated action across borders.
Making additional investments to strengthen cybersecurity capacity and resilience
Digital resilience—the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to cyber threats and disruptions—requires more than technology. It requires investment in people, institutions, and partnerships. As part of the European Security Program, we are investing additional resources to further our work with European governments, civil society, and innovators to strengthen local capabilities and build long-term resilience. Highlights include:
Strengthening public-private collaboration – Microsoft has launched a new pilot program with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), embedding Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) investigators at EC3 headquarters in The Hague to enhance intelligence sharing and operational coordination. Through this enhanced collaboration, we will enable joint investigations, identify faster threat identification, and be better positioned to disrupt cybercriminal activity targeting European institutions and citizens more effectively.
Supporting civil society and defending against ransomware – Microsoft has renewed our three-year partnership with the CyberPeace Institute to support NGOs and to promote accountability for bad actors, including nearly 100 Microsoft employees volunteering their time and expertise to help defend the most vulnerable in cyberspace. We will continue to support the Institute’s efforts to trace ransomware origins, identify safe havens, and uncover potential links to nation-state actors.
Expanding cybersecurity support to the Western Balkans – Through a new collaboration with the Western Balkans Cyber Capacity Centre (WB3C), Microsoft will scale cybersecurity in a region where malicious actors have long sought to destabilize countries bordering the EU. Microsoft stands firmly in defense of Ukraine and is now extending that commitment with WB3C to help scale cybersecurity capabilities in a geopolitically sensitive and digitally under-resourced region, aligning with broader European cybersecurity priorities.
Advancing AI security and innovation – Microsoft is investing additional resources to support research, expand the cybersecurity talent pipeline, and test advanced AI-assisted security tools in real-world environments using Microsoft’s security stack and Azure and Copilot capabilities. We’re working with the UK’s Laboratory for AI Security Research (LASR), a public-private partnership established to advance AI security in support of UK’s national security and economic prosperity. Together, we’re launching a joint research program focused on AI-cybersecurity challenges with a focus on critical infrastructure and agentic AI security, with an initial investment from Microsoft and research-collaboration between LASR and Microsoft Security Research Center.
Securing open-source innovation– Through the recently launched GitHub Secure Open Source Fund, we will support open-source projects that underpin the digital supply chain, catalyze innovation, and are critical to the AI stack. By raising the security posture for European projects such as Log4J and Scancode, which are critical to the IT systems of governments and companies across the continent, the program aims to reduce future security vulnerabilities. Ensuring these tools can continuously withstand and sustainably defend against sophisticated cyber threats is essential to strengthening cyber resilience.
These new and enhanced initiatives reflect our belief that cybersecurity is a collective endeavor—and that Europe’s digital resilience must be built from the ground up.
Expanding partnerships to disrupt cyberattacks and dismantle cybercriminal networks
Finally, as part of our European Security Program we are expanding our partnerships with law enforcement and regional actors to proactively identify new and innovative ways to disrupt malicious and criminal activity.
For instance, last month, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) worked with Europol and others to take down Lumma, a prolific infostealer malware used to steal passwords, financial data, and crypto wallets. In just two months, Lumma infected nearly 400,000 devices globally, many of them in Europe. The operation seized or blocked over 2,300 command-and-control domains. Off the back of this action, we are working with Europol to identify new opportunities to continue to meaningfully disrupt and deter cybercrime.
Lumma-infected devices by country in Europe
To accelerate future takedowns, we also launched the Statutory Automated Disruption (SAD) Program in April 2025. This initiative automates legal abuse notifications to hosting providers, enabling faster removal of malicious domains and IP addresses. Focused initially on Europe and the U.S., SAD raises the cost of doing business for cybercriminals and makes it harder for them to operate at scale.
In addition, we’re working with local internet service providers to help remediate affected users and ensure governments have greater visibility into emerging threats.
The DCU has long played a leading role in proactively combating cyber threats, including those originating from nation-state actors. Since 2016, Microsoft has filed seven legal actions to spotlight and disrupt nation-state threat actors from countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, which we refer to internally by the weather-themed names Blizzard, Typhoon, Sandstorm, and Sleet, respectively. Most recently, in September 2024, Microsoft initiated a disruption action against the Russian actor Star Blizzard, mentioned above, known for hacking political targets surrounding UK’s 2022 elections and targeting NATO countries to advance its geopolitical interests involving Ukraine. Microsoft exposed the Russian actors and directly seized over 140 malicious domains in total, substantially blunting ongoing campaigns and forcing Star Blizzard to significantly alter its attack methods to other platforms, which Microsoft Threat Intelligence thereafter publicly exposed in a security blog. We will continue to act against those seeking to harm customers, governments, and individual users. These efforts are part of our broader strategy to partner with law enforcement across Europe. We are already working on coordinated disruptions to protect the digital ecosystem, and we stand ready to provide robust incident response services during crises, ensuring our partners and customers are never alone in the face of cyber adversity.
We also believe that deterrence is a critical pillar of modern cybersecurity. The EU’s Cyber Diplomacy Toolbox plays a vital role in this effort, helping to coordinate crisis response and send a clear message that malicious activity will not go unanswered—legally, operationally, or reputationally.
Taken together, operations like the Lumma disruption, the launch of SAD, and future coordinated disruptions are helping to prevent cybercriminals and state actors from establishing malicious infrastructure in Europe.
* * *
At Microsoft, our commitment to Europe is deep, enduring, and unwavering. We believe that Europe’s digital future is one of the most important opportunities of our time—and protecting that future is a responsibility we share. We will stand shoulder to shoulder with European governments, institutions, and communities to defend against threats, build capacity, and strengthen resilience. We are proud to be a trusted partner to Europe, and we will continue to work every day to earn trust through transparency, collaboration, and a steadfast commitment to protecting what matters most.
Tags: Brad Smith, cybersecurity, Digital commitments, Europe
Headline: How AI can support better customer experiences
CRM systems have come a long way since their inception in the 1990s. What began as digital rolodexes evolved over the decades to accommodate cloud hosting, mobile access, and integrations across an organization’s tech stack. But for many businesses, the core experience of using a CRM system hasn’t kept pace with the evolving expectations of modern customers, or the realities of the people managing those relationships.
Legacy CRM systems often rely heavily on manual data entry. They’re difficult to adapt as businesses grow and are frequently designed more for reporting than for allowing sellers, marketers, and service teams to succeed in real time. While this might have sufficed when field reps had hours between customer visits or when service agents had time to type up detailed call notes, those conditions no longer exist.
Discover a new AI-powered CRM solution with Dynamics 365 Sales
Today’s customers do their homework. They research independently, engage across multiple digital channels, and expect seamless, personalized experiences. Meanwhile, customer-facing teams need tools that work in the flow of their day, not ones that add friction. Companies trying to meet these demands with yesterday’s systems are feeling the strain.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365, organizations are embracing a modern, AI-first approach that redefines productivity and customer engagement. Embedded Microsoft Copilot capabilities help sellers and customer service agents work smarter by generating content, surfacing insights, and summarizing customer interactions.
AI agents take this a step further, automating repetitive tasks and allowing teams to focus on what truly matters—building relationships and closing deals. In the near future, legacy CRM systems will become background systems, while AI-powered workflows will take center stage.
Together, copilots and agents can accelerate your business outcomes. For example, imagine a sales rep preparing for a big client meeting. Copilot can pull together a summary of recent customer interactions, generate a tailored pitch based on account details, and suggest case studies that may be relevant to the customer. Meanwhile, an AI agent is working in the background, logging customer inquiries, triggering follow-up tasks, and updating the sales pipeline based on real-time interactions.
Common CRM system challenges, and how an AI-first approach solves them
Microsoft has worked with hundreds of companies navigating CRM system modernization, and while each journey is unique, several pain points come up time and again. Here’s a look at the most common challenges, and how organizations are overcoming them with Dynamics 365.
The challenge: Disparate systems and data silos
Legacy CRM systems often sit apart from the tools employees use every day. Sales leaders have to jump between systems to get a full view of the customer, resulting in time lost, inconsistent data, and disconnected experiences for both employees and customers.
The solution: A unified platform
Dynamics 365 provides a unified platform across sales, marketing, and service. It brings together internal and external data in one place through Microsoft Dataverse and connects with the Microsoft tools people already rely on, like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft Power BI. That means relevant insights are available in the flow of work and updates happen in real time, which can reduce manual effort and improve accuracy.
The challenge: Lack of innovation
Many organizations are trying to retrofit AI into systems that weren’t built for it. As a result, they miss out on the true potential of AI to personalize engagement, suggest next steps, and automate time-consuming work.
The solution: AI integration
Dynamics 365 is built with AI at its core. With embedded Copilot capabilities, sellers can draft emails, generate proposals, and summarize meetings based on real-time customer data. AI agents go even further by handling complete workflows, like qualifying leads or following up on customer inquiries. With tools like Sales Agent, Sales Chat, and Sales Qualification Agent, sales teams can scale their impact and focus on high-value interactions.
The challenge: High total cost of ownership
Legacy CRM systems often require costly add-ons, third-party integrations, and ongoing maintenance. The systems that once seemed quick to deploy become difficult to scale or adapt and drain resources instead of delivering value.
The solution: Business value through consolidation
Dynamics 365 consolidates capabilities on a single platform, reducing redundancy and unlocking efficiencies. Since it uses tools that many companies already use—like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, and Power BI—organizations can get more from their existing investments.
ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, embraced Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and has lowered total cost of ownership for its customer engagement platform by up to 40%.
Real-world results: What an AI-first CRM system looks like in action
Companies that have made the leap to Dynamics 365 are already seeing measurable impact, including shortened sales cycles, improved responsiveness, and greater customer satisfaction.
For instance, Lenovo, a global leader in technology solutions, used Dynamics 365 to build a unified global view of customer activity and power its digital sales transformation.
“We’re seeing the benefit of having one standardized system and a global view to all geographies’ activities. This is the foundation for Lenovo’s sales digital transformation—enabling better connections and an increase in sales productivity and actionable insights.”
Wei Bi, Business Strategy Senior Manager, Lenovo
Lexmark, a global innovator in cloud-supported printing and internet of things (IoT) solutions, migrated from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 to streamline and modernize its sales operations.
“We’ve been on the journey with Microsoft after moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales. We’re excited to be one of the first customers to use Sales Qualification Agent and look forward to the ability to scale our sales team with agents and provide an exceptional experience to our customers.”
Kyle Farmer, Vice President, Global Sales and Strategy, Lexmark
Gardens Alive replaced its legacy CRM system with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, integrating voice, chat, and email channels through third-party connectors and unified routing. The result was a more than 7% improvement in customer service delivery.
And the momentum continues. In our Fiscal Year 2025 Third Quarter Earnings, Satya Nadella stated: “When it comes to business applications, Dynamics 365 again took share as companies like Avaya, Brunswick, SoftCat, switched to (Dynamics 365) from legacy providers. Verizon, for example, chose Dynamics 365 Sales to improve the efficiency of its sellers”.
More than a CRM system, Microsoft is a strategic resource in your transformation journey
For CROs and CSOs, the decision to modernize CRM systems is about more than upgrading technology. It’s about unlocking new potential. Companies want more than just a vendor; they’re looking for a strategic partner to help them navigate change, scale intelligently, and lead with data and empathy.
With Dynamics 365, Microsoft brings not only a powerful AI-first platform, but also a global ecosystem of expertise in sales, engineering, and business transformation. The result? A CRM system that’s intuitive, connected, and future-ready, so companies can deliver standout customer experiences and drive sustainable growth.
Ready to explore your own AI-first CRM system journey?
Take a guided tour, see a demo, or start a free trial.
Continuing Travelling Gallery’s 2025 programme is a group exhibition exploring ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives. Challenging the boundaries between culture and nature, the exhibition looks to destabilise colonial systems, categories, and hierarchies, that tend to favour scientific theory and marginalise ancestral knowledges and indigenous cosmologies.
Curated with Jelena Sofronijevic, and featuring work by artists Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Remi Jabłecki, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Leo Robinson, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, the exhibition brings together a variety of contemporary artistic practices, including drawing, printmaking, sculpture and film, that reimagine our collective understandings and visions of places and times.
Common across the works in the exhibition is the use of the seed as a means to think about and connect themes concerning ecologies, environments, and migration. For some, the seed represents a world of its own, a self-contained body or cell, capable of crossing borders. For others, it serves as a starting point for alternative possibilities and ways of being. Many of the artists have researched specific seeds, in their ‘native’ soils, and displaced in banks and libraries. The potato is offered as an incidental ‘root’ to many of their works. In the film, Kinnomic Botany (2022), Iman Datoo draws upon research in the Commonwealth Potato Collection at the James Hutton Institute near Dundee, the UK’s largest collection of potato seeds, to challenge dominant taxonomies or ways of classifying lives.
More speculative connections can be made between Remi Jabłecki and Radovan Kraguly’s practices. The former’s futuristic sculptures remind us of the otherworldly, even alien qualities of these most earthly and everyday British crops, with the artist using them as a means to think about transformation and personal growth. Kraguly’s prints,though as detailed as scientific and botanical illustrations, are similarly cosmic, avoiding categorisation in their ambiguous representations and titles. Reflecting on relations of control between humans and nature, his works also illustrate the role of different pastoral and agricultural environments in the formation of the artist’s own identity and early adoption of ‘climate politics’, connecting his formative experiences growing up on a farm in the former Yugoslavia, to his later practice in rural Wales.
Amba Sayal-Bennett’s architectural sculptures Kern (2024) and Phlo (2024) are part of the artist’s investigations into rubber, a commodity once so highly demanded its value surpassed that of silver. In a mission facilitated by the British government, Henry Wickham stole and trafficked 70,000 rubber seeds from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in 1876. Transported to Kew Gardens in London, they were then dispersed to British colonies for cultivation. Its plural uses and potential for profit led to its proliferation across the globe – yet the soil in India refused to take the seeds, which the artist puts forward as a form of environmental resistance to the colonial project. Artist Emii Alrai, by contrast, focusses on excavation, exploring archaeology, Western museological structures, and the complex process of ruination.
Scotland has proved fertile land for many of the artists’ practices, yet, for some, SEEDLINGS presents the first opportunity to experience their works in these contexts. Born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Zeljko Kujundzic lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC). His developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in these early experiences. Yet his part in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull, has, thus far, been walked over, in more conventional art histories. A selection of archive materials concerning his invention of the solar kiln, unearthed from public and private collections across the UK and Canada, are presented here for the first time – the exhibition itself seeking to germinate future research.
The exhibition will also include a newly commissioned essay, How does a tree fit inside a seed?, exploring the artists’ works, both individually, and as constellated in the exhibition, by the curator Jelena Sofronijevic. The text journeys through the construction and overlapping uses of terms like ‘native’ and, ‘invasive’, ‘indigenous’, ‘naturalisation’, and ‘dispersal’, to challenge binaries between beings, and consider ideas of home, identity, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Launching in Edinburgh on Calton Hill (outside the Collective Gallery) on Friday 6 June from 11am to 5pm, the exhibition will tour to arts venues, community centres, high streets and schools across Scotland including in the Western Isles, Glasgow, Falkirk,Clackmannanshire, North Lanarkshire, Scottish Borders before culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival in August.
It is accompanied by a series of interventions on social media, highlighting the artists’ connections to the places of our tour, and a number of talks, tours, and workshops, including with artist Leo Robinson.
Details of confirmed tour dates and venues can be found on the Travelling Gallery website.
Louise Briggs, Curator, Travelling Gallery said:
It has been a real pleasure to work with Jelena Sofronijevic on this exhibition and to be introduced to the work of a number of artists, many of whom have interesting connections to Edinburgh and Scotland through their work & research as well as their personal & professional lives. This exhibition continues to explore our annual theme looking at The Environment and Climate Emergency. We hope SEEDLINGS will offer visitors a new way of thinking about our relationship with, and connection to nature and may encourage them to perhaps think about our worlds and our interconnectedness in different ways.
Culture and Communities Convener Margaret Graham, said:
The Travelling Gallery is a unique and fantastic example of how art can and should be accessible for all. I’m delighted that, with our support, the Gallery has been able to remove barriers to art by taking powerful and thought-provoking exhibitions into communities across Scotland.
This year’s exhibition not only invites us to engage with outstanding contemporary works but also encourages us to reflect on the world through different lenses. With such a talented group of artists involved, I encourage everyone to visit when the gallery sets off this week.
Additional thanks go to: All of the exhibiting artists; Nena Kraguly; Family and Friends of Kujundzic; The City of Edinburgh Council; Creative Scotland; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Government Art Collection; Ingleby Gallery; Carbon 12 Gallery; Palmer Gallery; and the University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
