Sovereign

• Microsoft's chief AI responsibility officer, Natasha Crampton, is promoting "AI sovereignty" as a means to bridge the global digital divide. • The company is shifting its strategy by focusing on expanding local tax bases to fund public infrastructure and schools rather than seeking traditional corporate tax breaks for data center construction. • This approach aims to ensure that the deployment of AI infrastructure provides tangible economic benefits to the local communities where data centers are located.

• On 4 March 2026, a US military vessel torpedoed and sank the unarmed Iranian frigate IRIS Dena off the southern coast of Sri Lanka. • The attack resulted in over 80 deaths and more than 30 injuries among Iranian sailors who were returning home from the Indian Navy's biennial Exercise MILAN. • This incident represents a significant escalation of military aggression against an unarmed vessel, raising urgent concerns regarding international maritime law and regional sovereignty.

US government says it wants to ‘systematically disable’ The Hague-based international criminal courtA spokesperson for the EU has pushed back against the Trump administration’s assertion that the international criminal court poses a threat to US sovereignty, a day after the US government said it would work to “systematically disable” a global tribunal that seeks to prosecute some of the world’s gravest crimes.“We stand firm in our support for the international criminal court (ICC),” an EU spokesperson, Anouar El Anouni, said on Tuesday. “Attacks or threats against the court-elected officials, personnel or those cooperating with the court are simply not acceptable.” Continue reading...

Plane bringing Houthi delegation home from Tehran had to divert after Yemeni government bombed Sana’a airportMiddle East crisis live – latest updatesIranian flights to and from Yemen are an unacceptable violation of the country’s sovereignty, the vice-president in Yemen’s Saudi-backed, UN-recognised government has said.Abdullah al-Alimi said in an interview that the planes contained equipment for the Houthi movement, which he said had transformed from merely a domestic threat into a regional and international threat to global security and the global economy. Continue reading...

• The European Parliament voted 414-224 to initiate a verification procedure against the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) party over alleged violations of EU values. • Founded in August 2024 by eight parties including Germany's AfD, Poland's Confederation, and France's Reconquete, the ESN recently added Italy's National Future party. • The procedure is significant because a finding of non-compliance could result in the ESN losing its official EU party status and critical funding.

• EU public procurement processes are shifting to prioritize "digital sovereignty," placing a higher premium on cloud providers that can guarantee data is stored exclusively within the trading bloc. • New requirements aim to prevent foreign authorities from accessing sensitive European data, creating stricter compliance hurdles for non-EU cloud service providers. • This shift matters as it potentially limits the market share of major US-based hyperscalers and creates competitive advantages for local European cloud infrastructure.

• Giorgos Verdi argues that the European Union must combine strategic AI investments with aggressive antitrust actions against American Big Tech monopolies to achieve true tech sovereignty. • The author contends that funding alone is insufficient if dominant U.S. firms continue to stifle European competition and control the underlying digital infrastructure. • This shift is critical because current market imbalances prevent EU startups from scaling, leaving Europe dependent on foreign technology for its economic and security needs.