WHEN CHINA made English a compulsory primary-school subject in 2001, the same year it joined the World Trade Organisation, it was taken as a sign that the once-insular country was opening up. The education ministry said the new language requirement was part of a national strategy to “face modernisation, face the world and face the future”.
TopStartups aim to reinvigorate local news in America
IN ITS HEYDAY in the 1950s, the spacious five-storey redbrick building on North Calvert Street h...
TopWhat China gets wrong
IT IS OFTEN said that China’s government plans decades ahead, carefully playing the long game as...
TopWhy America keeps delaying student-loan repayments
EMERGENCY MEASURES often outlast the crises that prompt them. So it is with federal student-loan...
TopHotWhat happens if America’s Supreme Court overturns women’s right to abortion
A woman in Missouri who decides to end her pregnancy has a choice, of sorts. She can go to the state’s last remaining abortion clinic, in St Louis, where state law dictates she must be told that “the life of each human being begins at conception” and warned of...
TopKen Paxton’s bid for re-election is a test of Texas Republicans’ values
IN 2013 A little-known state senator passed through the security check at a courthouse in Collin...
TopVladimir Zhirinovsky’s highly methodical madness
HE LIKED TO dress in bright colours. Acidic yellow, fluorescent red and purple were his favourites for a jacket. His top shirt button was always undone, his tie loose, his suit crumpled and covered in his last dinner.
TopHotCanada’s Liberal government tries to boost the economy
OVER THE next four decades Canada’s growth per person is expected to be the lowest in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. On April 7th Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister, sought to correct that. In presenting the federal budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year, which began on April 1st, she vowed to tackle the “insidious” problem of low productivity growth.
The way Chinese think about covid-19 is changing
READING THE news backwards has long been a useful skill in China, where officials often obfuscat...
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.
TopTracking ships at sea can help catch sanction-busters
NEVER BEFORE have the activities of ocean-going vessels been under so much scrutiny. So says Ole...
TopHotThe world this week:business
America’s annual rate of inflation as measured by the official consumer-price index jumped again in March to 8.5%, from 7.9% in February. Inflation is being fuelled by surging energy and commodity prices.
TopNever mind stitches—it is possible to solder wounds closed
IF YOU CUT yourself, your options are to reach for a plaster or, if the cut is nasty, to go to a...
TopSelf-service petrol stations hit a roadblock in New Jersey
DRIVE ANYWHERE in New Jersey and you will almost certainly see a bumper sticker or a car magnet bragging that “Jersey girls don’t pump gas”. For 73 years, New Jerseyans have relied on petrol-station attendants to fill their cars and lorries, rather than do it themselves.
TopBlack Americans have overtaken white victims in opioid death rates
THE TYPICAL face of America’s opioid epidemic has long been that of a white man from a post-industrial town in the Appalachian mountains. White victims have accounted for 78% of the more than 500,000 opioid-overdose deaths since the late 1990s. In 2017 counties in Appalachia experienced rates 72% higher than the average for the rest of the country.
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