Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

London isn't like other countries urban centres. It's Britain's centre of everything. Government,

commerce, culture, but on the other side of the pandemic, the big smoke may not end up

dominating quite so much. Maybe that's a good thing.

And it's not every day that you get to learn about the cloaked dagger world of spies.

But now a researcher has uncovered a decades-old pact between Spooks from five European countries.

Can the Alliance continue to do its covert work?

First up though.

Manyapolis has been engulfed by protests this week over the killing of an unarmed black man by police.

On Monday, George Floyd died after a white officer pinned him down, kneeling on his neck.

In a video he can be heard repeatedly telling police, I can't breathe.

Overnight protestors threw fireworks at police and set up police building a light.

The governor requested reinforcements from the National Guard.

The protests have spread to New York, Denver, Phoenix. In Columbus, Ohio, demonstrators tried to enter the state house.

In Los Angeles, members of the movement Black Lives Matter gathered outside the hall of justice.

For them, the phrase, I can't breathe, harks back to an incident that galvanized the movement in 2014.

Then, Black Lives Matter had momentum, real cultural currency. It felt like their calls for systemic change might be answered.

This week's fiery protests are a reminder that the anger behind the movement hasn't diminished, even if it might seem the movement itself has.

So that phrase, I can't breathe that we heard in Minneapolis, is very resonant of what we heard from 2014 with a man Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a policeman.

Adam Roberts is the economist's Midwest correspondent.

He was saying I can't breathe and the phrase became a phrase that was used by Black Lives Matter to complain about police brutality and the frequent killing of African-American men by the police.

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