The social-media giant’s external-review body upheld a ban on former president Donald Trump—for now. We ask how a narrow ruling reflects on far broader questions of free speech and regulation.
America’s young offenders are often handed long sentences and face disproportionate harms; we examine reforms that are slowly taking hold. And the Broadway mental-health musical that is a surprise hit in China.
Neodymium is critical to making the wheels of a Tesla spin or creating sound in Apple’s Airpods, and China dominates the mining and processing of this rare-earth mineral. So the U.S. and its allies are building their own supply chain. Photo illustration: Clément Bürge/WSJ
The next generation of computing is on the horizon, and several new machines may just smash all the records…with two nations neck and neck in a race to get there first.
The ENIAC was capable of about 400 FLOPS. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which basically tells us how many calculations the computer can do per second. This makes measuring FLOPS a way of calculating computing power. So, the ENIAC was sitting at 400 FLOPS in 1945, and in the ten years it was operational, it may have performed more calculations than all of humanity had up until that point in time—that was the kind of leap digital computing gave us. From that 400 FLOPS we upgraded to 10,000 FLOPS, and then a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion FLOPS. That’s petascale computing, and that’s the level of today’s most powerful supercomputers. But what’s coming next is exascale computing. That’s zeroes. 1 quintillion operations per second. Exascale computers will be a thousand times better performing than the petascale machines we have now. Or, to put it another way, if you wanted to do the same number of calculations that an exascale computer can do in ONE second…you’d be doing math for over 31 billion years.
A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, Taiwan: the most dangerous place on earth, post-covid syndrome (09:00) and Buttonwood: private-credit markets (28:55)
If countries were people, the relationship between China, America and Taiwan would be a love triangle like no other.
Taiwan is by some reckoning the most dangerous flashpoint between China and America. Though Taiwan is in most respects an independent country, China insists it is part of the People’s Republic and is not ruling out taking the island by force. If that were to happen it could ignite an all-out war between America and China. This film explains how this precarious situation came about and how might it play out.
Europe’s parliament has overwhelmingly voted to extend a stopgap trade agreement. But the rancour behind the vote, and the deal’s thin measures, say much about future relations.
Female soldiers are entering armed forces in big numbers, but they still face barriers both in getting the job and in doing it. And China’s homegrown Oscar-winning director is scrubbed from its internet.
In less than six months, Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma’s Ant IPO, which could have been the world’s largest, was scuttled and his companies brought in line by regulators. The U.S. is also taking aim at big tech, but here’s how China moves faster. Photo illustration: Sharon Shi
Chinese Covid-19 vaccines offer relatively low levels of protection compared with some of their foreign rivals. Here is why China is joining other countries in considering mixing and matching vaccines as a key to overcoming multiple vaccination challenges at once. Illustration: Ksenia Shaikhutdinova
We discuss the UN’s report into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and hear about a new comprehensive agreement signed between Beijing and Tehran.
Plus: we head to Iceland as the countdown to Eurovision begins.
The Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in Hunan, China is famed for its towering, pillar-like karst formations. One of the fastest and easiest ways to view them is by riding up Bailong Elevator, the world’s tallest outdoor lift.
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