To describe Moon Jae-in's expressions as "ashen-faced" would be an understatement. In a photograph released by his office early on May 25th, South Korea's president looked a decade older than his 65 years. The downward turn of his lips suggested that he might be about to cry. The picture was taken at an emergency meeting Mr Moon had been forced to convene late the previous night after Donald Tru..
Republican-led states are using waivers to impose work requirements for the first time ever American lawmakers are acutely afraid of rewarding the loafing poor. For that reason, Congress has set strict work requirements on federal food assistance and cash welfare. The Trump administration is now steadily doing the same for Medicaid, as America's health-insurance programme for the poor is known. ..
The Dutch East India Company (abbreviated to VOV in Dutch), was a publicly tradable corporation that was founded in 1602 and became defunct in 1799. It was originally established as a chartered company to trade with India and Indianized Southeast Asian countries when the Dutch government granted it a 21-year monopoly on the Dutch spice trade. The VOC was an early multinational corporation in its..
The Haijin(海禁) or sea ban was a series of related isolationist Chinese policies restricting private maritime trading and coastal settlement during most of the Ming dynasty and some of the Qing. First imposed to deal with Japanese piracy amid the mopping up of Yuan partisans, the sea ban was completely counterproductive: by the 16th century, piracy and smuggling were endemic and mostly consisted ..
Chinoiserie is the European interpretation and imitation of Chinese and East Asian artistic traditions, especially in the decorative arts, garden design, architecture, literature, theatre, and music. The aesthetic of Chinoiserie has been expressed in different ways depending on the region. Its acknowledgement derives from the current of Orientalism, which studied Far East cultures from a histori..
Nearly a quarter of the world's population remains unbanked. But mobile phones are helping to change that, writes Simon Long As the Ebola virus was devastating parts of west Africa in 2014, Sierra Leone's difficulties were compounded by its emergency-response workers going on strike. They were risking their lives, but were often paid erratically and not in full. Sometimes they traveled long dist..
Hardline demands from both countries raise the risk of a trade war Start with the good news from the trade negotiations between China and America. After weeks of threatening tariffs and counter-tariffs, representatives from the world's two biggest economies are at last talking. Over two days of meetings in Beijing, which ended on May 4th, Chinese and American officials laid out their grievances ..
Complacent, reckless leaders have forgotten how valuable it is to restrain nuclear weapons Rarely do optimism and North Korea belong in the same breath. However, the smiles and pageantry in April's encounter between Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in, leaders of the two Koreas, hinted at a deal in which the North would abandon nuclear weapons in exchange for a security guarantee from the world, and in ..
Corporate debt could be the culprit Interest rates are heading higher and that is likely to put financial markets under strain. Investors and regulators would both dearly love to know where the next crisis will come from. What is the most likely culprit? Financial crises tend to involve one or more of these three ingredients: excessive borrowing, concentrated bets, and a mismatch between assets ..
An inquiry at the old haunt of Sartre and de Beauvoir For aspiring and often penniless intellectuals, the Cafe de Flore on the left bank in Paris, with its Art Deco interior and bow-tied waiters, was once, recounts Agnes Poirier, "a university". "Conversations were not loud; the air was serious, books stood between glasses, and the lighting was decidedly dim... Men wore corduroy jackets, turtlen..
America and its allies again try to deter Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons America, Britain and France fired a barrage of missiles at targets inside Syria on April 14th. The early-morning strikes aimed to punish the regime of Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical-weapons attack that killed dozens of people in the city of Douma a week earlier. More than 100 cruise missiles, launched..
The pelagic zone consists of the water column of the open ocean, and can be further divided into regions by depth. The word "pelagic" is derived from Greek πέλαγος (pélagos), meaning 'open sea'. The pelagic zone can be thought of in terms of an imaginary cylinder or water column that goes from the surface of the sea almost to the bottom. Conditions differ deeper in the water column such that as ..
Pelagic fisheries are fisheries for pelagic fish, that is, for fish that are offshore in the open ocean, such as small schooling forage fish, sometimes called bait fish, and larger fish who prey on them, such as tuna and ocean sharks. The major fishery in the Maldives is the tuna fishery. The most important tuna species is the skipjack tuna, although they are coming under increasing pressure. Ne..
Vladimir Putin's election victory does not mean that there is no hope Konstantin Chernenko, the general secretary of the Communist Party, died on the night of March 10th 1985 at the age of 73. As red flags trimmed with black ribbons went up in every city in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev rushed to an emergency meeting of the Politburo in the Kremlin. That meeting put Mr Gorbachev in charge ..
A rally in Washington, DC organized by the student-survivors of a shooting in Florida, was one of several hundred around the world On March 24th, less than 40 days after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, hundreds of thousands gathered near Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to protest against America's lax gun laws and implore Congress and President Donald..