After a five-month hiatus, violence has returned to the northern region of Tigray—but that is just one of the conflicts threatening to pull the country to pieces.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has made it a prominent developing-world lender. How will it deal with so many of its loans souring? And our obituaries editor reflects on Issey Miyake’s fashion-for-the-masses philosophy.
UN inspectors head to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Plus: Sri Lanka’s pact with the IMF, why China and Hong Kong’s elite are leaving for Singapore and the latest arts and culture news.
A.M. Edition for Aug. 15. Ukraine’s battlefield defense against Russia may be gradually strengthening, but the country is facing a widening financial shortfall.
WSJ reporter Marcus Walker says Kyiv has been forced to print money to cover the cost of fighting Russia’s invasion, which has pummeled Ukraine’s economy. Luke Vargas hosts.
Senate Democrats pass major legislation addressing health care, taxes, and climate change. Antony Blinken is in South Africa to lay out a new strategy for US relations in the region. Results of a new poll find stark racial disparities when it comes to accessing healthcare.
We discuss the brewing crisis in Taiwan that has dominated the Asean meeting. Plus: Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán take centre stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a review of the papers and the latest business news.
China conducts live-fire military drills. Plus: Sri Lanka’s new economic plan, an alliance between Italy’s centre-left and centrists, and Japan’s ‘roll-the-dice train’.
A.M. Edition for Aug. 3. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded a visit to Taiwan today, pledging to preserve democracy on the island in the face of growing threats from mainland China.
WSJ senior China correspondent Brian Spegele says that Beijing’s response to the visit –which includes new military exercises around Taiwan and a ban on certain Taiwanese products – is still just getting underway. Luke Vargas hosts.
For the past three decades, China has been furiously turning farmland into instant cities, transforming a heavily agrarian society into one with nearly 64 percent of its population now urbanized. In recent years, though, affluent Chinese have started to rediscover their culture’s deep roots in the countryside and the lure of the nation’s often dramatic landscapes. Architects like Ma Yansong, who founded MAD Architects in Beijing in 2004, are now busy exploring new ways of connecting the constructed environment to the natural one. Ma often talks of his notions of shanshui culture, referring to the Chinese words for “mountain” and “water” and to design inspired by a reverence for earth and sky. Yet his approach is anything but traditional. Instead, it aims to reinvent nature—for example, crafting an opera house in Harbin to look as if it were sculpted by wind and water and calling a 5 million-square-foot residential complex in Beihai with rolling roofs Fake Hills.
The US weighs a prisoner swap with Russia. Plus: Taiwan’s armed forces step up military drills, we look ahead to Kenya’s general election and get the latest arts and culture news.