What’s been more beneficial for the U.S. economy?
President Trump and his economic policies — or China and Russia?
At least for the cybersecurity sector, many firms should be thanking our adversaries for a growing business.
Source: The cybersecurity sector is booming — but so are our enemies | TheHill
Quitting the UNHRC won’t make it disappear. It opens a leadership vacancy that China is happy to fill. The Trump administration has stepped back to allow China the space to dominate the council unchallenged and advance its agenda to redefine human rights after the “China model.”
As Xi pushes his authoritarian agenda on the international stage while undertaking the worst crackdown on human rights since the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 back home, now is the time to stand up, not stand down.
ASOS, the popular and rapidly growing British online fashion retailer, has announced a major new change in the products it will—or rather won’t—carry.
Under pressure from the animal-welfare group PETA, the company has joined the likes of Zara, H&M, Gap, and others in ditching mohair, but it’s also going a few steps further.
The company’s new policy will ban products using cashmere, silk, feathers (including down), bone, horn, shell (including mother of pearl), and teeth from ASOS’s websites too. It will be fully in effect by the end of January 2019.
But one banned material in the list has caused some to pause: Silk, which is made by silkworms.
Source: ASOS is banning silk, but is it really unethical to wear? — Quartzy
“I have to say the Greek government is happy with this deal,” the finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, said on Friday. “But at the same time, this government will not forget what the Greek people went through in the past eight years.”
The country now has “all the building blocks … to turn the agenda away from one of fiscal adjustment … to one of growth”, he said, but added that the government “has to make sure the Greek people quickly see concrete results … They need to feel the change in their own pockets.”
Source: Greece ‘turning a page’ as eurozone agrees deal to end financial crisis | World news | The Guardian
While DACA remains in legal limbo, the educational rights of children no matter their legal status were codified by the Supreme Court in 1982. In Plyler vs. Doe, the justices held that age-appropriate children are entitled to a K-12 public education regardless of their immigration status. Districts also can’t implement policies or practices that might have a chilling effect on immigrant student enrollment, such as requiring Social Security numbers on paperwork.
Plyler vs. Doe was back in the headlines in late April after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told a congressional committee it was “a local community decision” whether students suspected of being in the country illegally would be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She walked back her remark in a subsequent hearing two weeks later.
Source: Schools Offer Support for Immigrant Teachers, Students | The Report | US News
While China’s cities are at the frontier of global growth, many of them are still little known to the world. And in a country this large, there is no one “city type.” Urban China is as complex and varied as the United States.
To examine these variations, we classified the 103 Chinese cities in our report into five unique categories based on their size, industrial composition, and growth patterns.
We differentiate China’s remaining 81 metro areas—most of them mid-sized (average employment of 1.6 million and average GDP of $106.9 billion)—based on their industrial structure.
Source: Meet the five urban Chinas
In less than a month the odd-couple coalition backing Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has outdone even Trump.
Leaders of the right-wing League and quixotic 5-Star Movement have insulted neighbors and cast away migrants.
The derisory English term “fake news” rolls off their tongues more fluently than “buongiorno”.
Like Trump, the Italian government has even managed to pick a fight with Canada.
But making Rome great again, as it were, is proving difficult.
Source: Breakingviews – Cox: Italy’s new Caesars have outdone Donald Trump | Reuters
That is not necessarily in itself a bad deal – and if it reduces the risk of escalation and a potentially devastating conflict, President Moon Jae-in’s South Korean government may well be happy. Suggestions Trump was actively considering withdrawing all U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula, however, will likely be more disturbing for Seoul.
And for other U.S. allies who have long come to rely on the presence of U.S. forces and joint exercises to deter their enemies, this development would feel very worrying indeed.
Nowhere is this more true than in Europe, where officials are now increasingly nervous about Trump’s upcoming visit to the annual NATO summit in July.
Trump has made no secret of his belief that European states contribute far too little to their own defense, not to mention the 65,000 U.S. forces currently based on the continent.
Last year, he openly hectored them on the topic – and after the bad blood of this month’s G7 summit in Canada, there are widespread worries that things will be even more acrimonious this time.
Source: Commentary: The danger of Trump’s decision on Korea ‘war games’ | Reuters
U.S. protectionism is self-defeating and a “symptom of paranoid delusions” that must not distract China from its path to modernization, Chinese media said on Friday as Beijing kept up with its war of words with Washington while markets wilted.
President Donald Trump threatened on Monday to hit $200 billion of Chinese imports with 10 percent tariffs if China retaliates against his previous targeting of $50 billion in imports.
Source: Chinese media says U.S. has ‘delusions’ as impact of trade war spreads | Reuters
Since October, many universities across China have placed “Xi Thought” at the core of their curricula – the first time since the era of Mao Zedong that a Chinese leader has been accorded similar academic stature.
Mandatory ideology classes have been updated by the universities in response to instruction from the leadership that Xi’s ideas must enter the textbooks, classrooms and minds of students.
Xi Thought, which is literally the collection of his public statements, is an all-encompassing guide for China’s professed aims of becoming an economic and military power by 2050, under the strict control of the ruling Communist Party.
Source: In China, universities seek to plant ‘Xi Thought’ in minds of students | Reuters