In a message to Chinese aerospace engineers and researchers for “Youth Day” earlier this month, President Xi Jinping shared his ambitions for the industry. Young workers should advance the cause of Chinese self-reliance, he said, following in the footsteps of their predecessors who developed a home-grown nuclear weapon, missile and satellite, with little help from outsiders, in a campaign in the era of Mao Zedong called “Two bombs, one satellite”.
TopWhat will it cost to rebuild Ukraine
WHEN THE devastating war ended, the country resembled a wasteland. Its industrial infrastructure had been flattened by air raids and its great cities bombed out with terrible loss of life. Russian-led forces occupied the east, with millions fleeing their brutality.
TopThe French presidential election: Standing out from the crowd
On April 6th 2016 a 38-year-old former investment banker who, two years before, had been appointed as a minister in France’s Socialist government announced that he wanted to change French politics.
TopThe new Russian cult of war
ON MARCH 22ND, in a penal colony 1,000km north-east of the front lines around Kyiv, Alexei Navalny, the jailed leader of Russia’s opposition, was sentenced to another nine years imprisonment.
TopWith America distracted, Iran hits Iraq’s Kurds
ERBIL, THE capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, has long been the country’s safest haven—and its friendliest to the West. But just after midnight on March 13th Iran hammered the city with 12 cruise missiles.
TopUkraine fights on
“REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR,” Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, entreated America’s Congress. “Remember September 11th…Every night for three weeks, in various Ukrainian cities, Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death.”
TopRussian soldiers expecting to be welcomed to Ukraine were soon disabused
KHERSON IS ABOUT as far up the Dnieper from the Black Sea as Bordeaux is up the Gironde from the Bay of Biscay; its population, 280,000, is a bit larger.