When US president Donald Trump took office in January he inherited a strong economy, which was growing faster than those of many of its rivals. Nevertheless, he won the election in November on the back of strong voter dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the cost of living. This is the legacy of high inflation sparked first by COVID and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Posters in Tokyo’s enormous Shinjuku railway station are normally used for advertising commodities like cosmetics and food, as well as new films. But occasionally you may happen across a poster with a birthday message and a picture of a young man, often from a boy band and typically with impeccable looks.
These posters are created by specialised advertising companies and are paid for by adoring fans. They are part of a phenomenon called oshikatsu, a term coined in recent years that is made from the Japanese words for “push” and “activity”.
It’s telling that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration wants to fire bureaucrats.
Airline passengers wait at a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint before boarding to flights in Denver in 2022. Patrick T.
I Love Coffee dot Today/ShutterstockPoliticians and economists have been pretty vocal in their response to the ongoing saga of Donald Trump’s tariffs. But much less has been heard from the world’s poorest workers about how they will be affected.
The 2024 arrest and subsequent release of activist Paul Watson, the founder of the NGO Sea Shepherd that fights to protect ocean
In the sweltering summer of AD18, a desperate chant echoed across China’s sun-scorched plains: “Heaven has gone blind!” Thousands of starving farmers, their faces smeared with ox blood, marched toward the opulent vaults held by the Han dynasty’s elite rulers.
Not just a British icon – a WHSmith outlet in an airport in Doha, Qatar. TY Lim/ShutterstockAfter 124 years as a familiar fixture to generations of customers, there will no longer be a place for WH Smith on UK high streets.
Recent months have seen a dramatic shift in US policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). These changes carry deep economic consequences. President Donald Trump’s executive orders aim to ban DEI initiatives in federal agencies and contractors, and private companies have felt pressure to weaken or drop their DEI programmes. Trump has framed what was once a corporate safeguard against discrimination as “illegal and immoral”, marking a stark reversal in legal and business norms.
The 2025 spring meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund takes place in Washington, D.C. Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty ImagesIn 2021, the World Bank shut down one of its flagship projects: the Doing Business index, a global ranking system that measured how easy it was to start and run a business in 190 countries.
