When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of…
There were several important outcomes of the previous three-day visit made by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Japan (from November 10 to November 12, 2016), but it is the Cooperation Agreement on the development of high-speed railway transport that attracts particular attention. It, alongside other facts that have emerged over the past few years,…
The Chinese military has conducted air force drills in the western Pacific close to Beijing’s regional rivals Japan and Taiwan on Friday and Saturday. The Japanese Air Force scrambled fighter jets to shadow the Chinese planes. On Friday, Chinese military planes flew through the Bashi Channel that separates Taiwan and the Philippines. Later on Saturday,…
Smog-sucking towers in the Chinese capital city have filtered 10 Beijing National Stadium’s worth of air and have removed billions of harmful PM2.5 particles out of the polluted atmosphere that millions of Chinese citizens are exposed to every day, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The seven-meter tall towers constructed in The Netherlands have…
On October 1, 2016, China’s yuan has been officially accepted in the list of the IMF’s (International Monetary Fund) reserve currency with a share of 10.93%, taking third place after the US dollar (41.73%) and the Euro (30.93%). This means that all central banks around the world are now required to keep a portion of…
A half-hearted near handshake between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin before and after they spoke «for about four minutes», standing up, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, Peru, captured to perfection the melancholic dwindling of the Obama era. A whirlwind flashback of the fractious relationship between…
