Italy’s long slide below replacement birth rate is driven by fewer women of childbearing age and weak support systems, not by “selfish” young women.
Tag: policy
Far from being a threat, migration has contributed to maintaining the balance between workers and retirees, delaying a demographic collapse that would otherwise already be underway.
In Argentina, gas and oil are more than fuels — they’re sacred words, woven into the nation’s identity. But this devotion is not just economic, it’s linguistic: The way Argentinians talk about hydrocarbons builds a cultural fortress, which makes any shift toward cleaner energy all the more difficult.
When French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled a dedicated passage for the Mona Lisa, the Louvre promised relief from crowds. Instead, it offered a stark preview of museums’ surrender to spectacle: galleries as curated stages where art is secondary to the social-media moment.
Donald Trump campaigned on ending America’s “forever wars” in the Middle East. But with airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, he’s become the president who finally crossed a line avoided by eight of his predecessors. He will now to try strike a deal, with an assist from Moscow.
Updated August 21, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. Brazil reports fires burning in the Amazon Rainforest at unprecedented rate on this day in 2019. How extensive were the fires in the Amazon rainforest? The fires in the Amazon rainforest of 2019 were widespread, affecting multiple countries in the region. The exact extent of the fires varied, […]
Hundreds of migrants and asylum seekers have been detained, many of them deported, in recent months in Egypt amid an orchestrated campaign that is targeting African refugees in the country.
Chatbots and other machine learning tools could make the legal system more equitable for those seeking civil justice, or it could do other things with that power too….
Women play a vital role in the workplace, so the German government is introducing policies that reward families with two working parents. However, the strain of raising a family still falls unfairly on mothers, making them victims of capitalism.
A German politician got a taste for the backlash that can come from getting close to the vegetarian movement, especially as environmental factors make the choice even more loaded than at its birth in the animal rights movement.
Enduring COVID restrictions are the final straw for many expats in Hong Kong. They’re leaving by the thousands, threatening the city’s reputation as a financial hub.
Not only strict rules of freedom of movement as part of Zero-COVID policy but also an increase in censorship has raised many questions for the expat population in the megacity of 26 million that had long enjoyed a kind of special status in China as a place of freedom and openness. A recent survey of foreigners in the Chinese megacity found that 48% of respondents said they would leave Shanghai within the next year.
Russia’s foreign minister visited Pakistan for the first time in nine years — just in time for the deadline for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan. It points to an important change of actors in one of the deadliest conflict zones in the world.
Rather than ratchet up spending on America’s already bloated military, the U.S. president should take a broader view of national security and help develop economies elsewhere.
Europe is moving forward in a united front to force Big Tech that could lead to a historic showdown on the future of how the digital economy functions.
Donald Trump’s departure renews the possibility of talks between Washington and Tehran. But the Iranian leadership has reasons to be wary of the incoming administration in Washington.
At the heart of Beijing’s health diplomacy, traditional Chinese medicine accounts for nearly 30% of the Chinese pharmaceutical industry’s turnover, and anyone who criticizes it could be punished.
Fourteen months ago the progressive mayor of Riace, in Calabria, was arrested. Soon after, many of the refugees he’d help settle pulled up stakes and left.
The EU introduced its ‘Blue Card’ system to facilitate the arrival of qualified, non-European professionals. But only one country — Germany — really takes advantage of it.
The U.S. president has a history of strong-arming trading partners. But the move to tax things like French wine and Spanish olives is actually justified.
To meet its current healthcare needs, France looks to the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec which are giving more autonomy to nurses rather than boost the number of doctors.
Three years after the end of the one-child policy, China’s fertility rates are now falling. To have, or not have, children ought to be built on personal and family wishes, something the government still hasn’t understood.
-Analysis- CARACAS — Artificial Intelligence is opening up new opportunities for the economy and society. But it will also affect millions of human jobs, and thus poses a huge challenge for public policymakers, warns a 2016 White House report on AI’s projected impact on the U.S. economy. Among other things, the report predicts that AI […]
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Mexico’s Election, Between Fear And Disgust
There are three candidates but really just two choices in Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico: Move forward? Or try to recreate the past?
MOSCOW — Nicolas Maduro has been reelected as Venezuela’s president for a new six-year term. Alexei Kolesnikov in the Moscow-based independent magazine The New Times looks at international reaction to the election, specifically as it relates to Russia: “Last month’s election of Maduro was clearly flawed and not recognized as legitimate by neither the country’s […]
Finger pointing isn’t going to help Italy solve its migration problems. What it needs is help, and for the EU to stop dilly-dallying. A view from Berlin.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump often seems as though he’s stuck in the “80s. But maybe the better comparison is to the 1680s, not the Reagan era. Consider his announcement Thursday of new tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from the European Union, Canada and Mexico. These countries not only supply about half of our imports of these metals; they are also among our closest allies. Astonishingly, the White House claims that alienating these important military allies is necessary “to protect America’s national security.” These trade policies, and the supposed rationale behind them, bear an uncanny resemblance to classical mercantilism. […]
BEIJING — An online game from Japan has become a hopping success in China. Unheard of until recently, Tabikaeru: Travel Frog — developed by the Japanese company Hit-Point — is suddenly all the rage, leapfrogging the competition to become the most popular free online game in China’s Apple App Store. Travel Frog requires little of […]
Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is the surest sign that President Trump wants to dismantle the entire international relations system that the U.S. helped build after World War II.
-Analysis- There is style, and there is taste. There is also politics. The “style” in question here is the sort that is so often the source of bloody combat in the publishing world: whether to capitalize the Pope (pope), how to spell “okay” (OK?) and any number of sordid battles over the English language and […]
In strange and not-so-strange ways, Donald Trump’s actions are having the opposite effect of what he intended.
The Obama administration sought a Cuba policy aimed at helping ordinary Cubans. Trump is keeping most of the policy in place, with one wrong-headed exception.
-OpEd- BOGOTÁ –– For some time now, Latin America has not figured on the U.S. State Department’s agenda. If the continent did appear, it was at the bottom of the government’s list. This indifference has only grown starker since Donald J. Trump moved into the White House. This state of affairs is neither good nor […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As he nears his 100th day in office, President Donald Trump’s efforts to appear decisive and unequivocal in his responses to fast-moving global crises have been undercut by a series of confusing and conflicting messages from within his administration. Over the past two weeks, policy pronouncements from senior Trump aides have often been at odds with one another — such as whether Syrian President Bashar Assad must leave power as part of a negotiated resolution to end that nation’s civil war. In other cases, formal White House written statements have conflicted with those from government agencies, even […]
-OpEd- When U.S. President Donald Trump recounted last week’s bombing of Syria to a Fox News journalist, the first direct U.S. assault on the regime of the war-torn country, he shared an anecdote — in vivid detail — about eating chocolate cake with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-A-Lago estate. Trump: “I was sitting […]
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That’s A Long Time In Geopolitics
By now, that famous Harold Wilson quip “A week is a long time in politics’ can also just as well be applied to geopolitics. Last Monday, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi was enjoying the diplomatic courtesies and photo ops of a White House meeting with Donald Trump, as the world’s attention was mostly focused on […]
WASHINGTON — It is either a turning point or a welcome aberration that President Trump found the cruelly extinguished lives of Syrian children to be compelling (or at least contributory) in his decision to use force in Syria. The nerve gas attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime, he said, “crossed a lot of lines for me . . . innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies.” Much of Trump’s appeal during his presidential campaign was based on dehumanization — the characterization of migrants as criminals and refugees as terrorist threats. This is the first instance I can recall of Trump showing […]
Brexit could isolate Britain in its dispute with Argentina over the Falklands, though leaders in Buenos Aires need to think and speak clearly, or risk keep the status quo.
The ACLU is spending millions on a new ‘People Power’ campaign. The civil rights group’s push is the largest piece of a sprawling ‘resistance’ moving faster than Democratic Party leaders can think.
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama delivered State of the Union addresses without a full and detailed discussion of foreign policy, conservatives justifiably complained. We are a country at war, with rising, big power threats in an increasingly unstable world. All true. And yet when President Donald Trump said virtually nothing of substance Tuesday night on national security, conservatives by and large gave him a pass. Trump’s highlighting of the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens obscured the lack of substance on the cause for which Trump correctly said Owens gave his life. Repeating that we will eradicate […]