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..
This is a great question. It's also a hard one to answer in brief terms, but I’ll do my best!Near and nearby are both synonyms for close. However, there are three clear and important differences in their meaning and use: 1) The first difference is that near is often used as a preposition, but nearbycan never be properly used as a preposition. Furthermore, when near is a preposition, it doesn’t s..
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..
After Brexit, it will be a lot harder One question confronting Britain and the European Union is how to maintain foreign-policy and security co-operation after Brexit. Theresa May, Britain's prime minister, often notes that failure to find agreement would harm the security interests of both sides. On March 22nd that observation found a pointed form of expression at an EU summit in Brussels, foll..
We can use either the infinitive without to or the -ing form after the object of verbs such as hear, see, notice, watch. The infinitive without to often emphasizes an action or event which is in progress or not yet completed. CompareHe saw her drive off with a young man in the passenger seat. -> The speaker observed the whole event. Maria heard him coming up the stairs towards her room, and felt..
China's size and behavior are prompting a rethink on trade The post-war system of global trade has been close to expiring, seemingly, for most of the post-war period. It tottered in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan muscled trading partners into curbing their exports to America. It wobbled with the end of the fruitless Doha round of trade talks. The system now faces the antediluvian economics of Pre..
A BIS report advises: proceed with caution Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Stellar, Cardano: the infant world of cryptocurrencies is already mind-bogglingly crowded. Amid the cacophony of blackchain-based would-be substitutes for official currencies, central banks from Singapore to Sweden have been pondering whether they should issue digital versions of their own money, too. None is about to do so, but ..
Humans are starting to use the sea more as farmers than as hunters, says Hal Hodson In the summer of 1942, as America's Pacific fleet was slugging it out at the battle of Midway, the USS Jasper, a coastal patrol boat, was floating 130 nautical miles (24km) off the west coast of Mexico, listening to the sea below. It was alive with sound: "Some fish grunt, others whistle or sing, and some just gr..