“WOULD THE US really dare to freeze or confiscate China’s reserve assets?” asked Wang Yongli, a former director of Bank of China, in an article last month. Good question. After Russia invaded Ukraine, America and its allies imposed crippling sanctions on Russia’s central bank, removing from its reach about half of its foreign-exchange reserves.
TopA sound way towards reversible vasectomies
THE MOST reliable means of contraception for men—and one that cannot fail or be forgone in the heat of the moment—is a vasectomy. But the procedure is largely irreversible: it involves stopping the flow of sperm from the testes by cutting conduits known as the vas deferens and sealing them or tying them off.
TopSir Keir Starmer’s transformation of the Labour Party
THREE YEARS AGO Momentum seemed to be riding high. The left-wing activist group had been formed to support Jeremy Corbyn, the radical leader of the Labour Party.
TopHotLatin America is becoming more secular
ALEJANDRA LEMONNIER joined the convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus when she was 20. She came from a religious family, attended a Roman Catholic school and lived in a conservative part of Buenos Aires.
TopThe race to be the next president of France enters the final stretch
THERE WERE 12 candidates to pick from, but in the end the French chose the same presidential fin...
TopCan Silicon Valley still dominate global innovation
TAKE AN EVENING walk on 17th Cross Road in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout district, and you bump into tech types stepping out of their startup’s office and into one of the local microbreweries.
TopAn ode to Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower
THE NAKAGIN CAPSULE TOWER stands out from its unremarkable neighbours in Tokyo’s Shimbashi distr...
TopWhy China is turning away from English
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.
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