Geopolitics & international affairs
Japan’s government has set its first national target for rebuilding nuclear reactors since the 2011 Fukushima disaster: two to five new units by the 2040s. The decision was adopted at a meeting of cabinet ministers at the prime minister’s office on Friday, part of a revised energy policy meant to prepare for a power shortage […]
On Saturday, the border trade route through Nathu La pass in the eastern Himalayas reopened, six years after India closed it. The pass sits at more than 4,300 meters (14,108 feet) on the border between Sikkim and Tibet, where yak caravans once carried silk and salt between empires. It was shut in 2020, when the […]
The timing was either a coincidence or a message. On Friday morning, one day after Washington escalated its tariff fight with Santiago, Chile’s President Jose Antonio Kast received China’s ambassador to Chile, Niu Qingbao, at the presidential palace. The meeting ran more than an hour. The agenda was billed as routine: the bilateral relationship, a […]
In the besieged Sudanese city of el-Obeid, children are afraid to walk to school because of drones. The walk to class now runs through a war in which the cheapest weapons are flown over civilian streets, and the people who die most often are those who cannot hide. The United Nations has been counting the […]
Five months into the war with Iran, the country that is fighting it still has not been told why. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 69 percent of Americans, including four in ten Republicans, say President Trump has not clearly explained the goals of the US military campaign. Barely one in three backs the war […]
The Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo is the fastest-spreading on record, and it is hitting women with a particular cruelty: nearly every pregnancy touched by the virus ends in the death of the fetus. The tools to prevent those pregnancies exist and are cheap. A small portion of them are already bought and paid for, […]
Mie Prefecture asked about 10,000 residents whether the local government should keep hiring foreign nationals. The people the question was about were not asked. An advisory panel has now ruled that the question itself was discriminatory, which is a polite way of saying it was designed to produce the answer the governor wanted. The background […]
The numbers match, which is how you can tell this is deliberate. On Thursday the European Union put 14 Chinese and Hong Kong companies on its latest Russia sanctions list. On Friday, China put 14 European companies on its export control list. But the names tell the real story: Brussels hit small trading firms in […]
Lindsey Graham died on July 11, hours after announcing he had a deal with the White House on a Russia sanctions bill he had pushed for more than a year. His last political fight has become the closest thing Washington has to a new Russia policy, and it works by taxing the countries that buy […]
Apple’s artificial intelligence reached mainland China this week, two years after Apple Intelligence launched in the rest of the world. The first features are rolling out now, but the full AI-powered Siri is not ready. Tim Cook said as much on the earnings call. The gap between those two facts is less a technology story […]
