Foreign familiar

Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images While Ron DeSantis has yet to announce his 2024 presidential bid, he’s been sending signals on how he might differ from his Republican primary rivals, including Donald Trump . Earlier this month on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, the Florida governor expressed his low opinion of Ukraine as a foreign-policy priority for the United States. This America First stance on the most prominent U.S. national security commitment of the Biden administration was viewed as an effort to challenge Trump’s leadership of the MAGA movement on a hot-button issue. But it also produced quite a backlash among Republicans, who hoped DeSantis might represent a return to the pre-Trump GOP foreign-policy principles associated with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. DeSantis was directly criticized for disrespecting Ukraine by Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio . Other major GOP figures — including likely presidential rivals Mike Pence , Nikki … [Read more...] about DeSantis’s Trumpy Foreign Policy Goes Deeper Than Ukraine

So I guess we’re in a new cold war. Leaders of both parties have become China hawks. There are rumblings of war over Taiwan. Xi Jinping vows to dominate the century. I can’t help wondering: What will this cold war look like? Will this one transform American society the way the last one did? The first thing I notice about this cold war is that the arms race and the economics race are fused. A chief focus of the conflict so far has been microchips, the little gizmos that not only make your car and phone work, but also guide missiles and are necessary to train artificial intelligence systems. Whoever dominates chip manufacturing dominates the market as well as the battlefield. Second, the geopolitics are different. As Chris Miller notes in his book “Chip War,” the microchip sector is dominated by a few highly successful businesses. More than 90 percent of the most advanced chips are made by one company in Taiwan. One Dutch company makes all the lithography machines that are … [Read more...] about The Cold War With China Is Changing Everything

Another Oscar season, another snub for the Dardenne brothers . Their “Two Days, One Night,” Belgium’s submission for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, won various festival and critics’ awards, as well as a European Film Award this month for Marion Cotillard’s taut performance as a factory worker whose job is in jeopardy. But the drama did not make the cut for the Oscar shortlist — the fourth time that the Dardennes, two of the most acclaimed European filmmakers, have been passed over by Hollywood. In “Two Days, One Night,” which opened on Wednesday, Ms. Cotillard plays Sandra, who has been fired from her assembly line job at a small solar panel plant, but has been given a tiny ray of hope: If she can persuade a majority of her fellow workers to forgo the bonus they are to receive upon her dismissal, she will be reinstated. Over a frantic weekend, she visits her co-workers at home or at play, and encounters the most diverse of responses. “We were working on … [Read more...] about Respect and Awards, but Still No Oscar

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 12 TOKYO (AP) — Global shares were mixed Thursday after the Federal Reserve raised a key interest rate, while noting the end may be near for its economy-crunching hikes to interest rates. France's CAC 40 declined 0.3% in early trading to 7,112.95, while Germany's DAX slipped 0.2% to 15,183.25. Britain's FTSE 100 dipped 0.5% to 7,532.54. U.S. shares were set to drift higher with Dow futures up 0.5% to 32,430.00. S&P 500 futures added 0.7% to 3,999.75. In Britain, investors were awaiting an interest rate decision by the Bank of England. Many economists had expected the central bank to keep rates on hold, until the unwelcome news this week that soaring prices for vegetables helped push inflation to 10.4% in February. The Fed raised its key overnight rate by a quarter of a percentage point, the same size as its last increase, in … [Read more...] about Global shares mixed after Fed hints rate hikes may end soon

By the end of the 2023 NCAA tournament, an estimated one in four Americans will have wagered $15.5 billion in bets on the various games, according to the American Gaming Association. Last year, Matt Cappelen — a 34-year-old firefighter from Elk Grove Village, Illinois — would have been in the middle of the action. For this year’s dance, though, he’ll be sitting on the sidelines of the betting game. “I’ve always been a die-hard sports fan,” Cappelen said. “Pretty much anything that involves a winner and a loser, I loved.” Since legal online sports betting was first made available in Illinois in 2020, the fun of sports had only gotten that much bigger for Cappelen. “I was able to combine making money, or so I thought, and sports,” he said. “What better way to do that than with gambling?” But in the three years since, Cappelen built up $83,000 in gambling debts on sites like Bovada and FanDuel. Up to 90% of that, he says, was done on credit cards. “You feel like you’re … [Read more...] about Why you should bench credit cards for March Madness bets

ALL THE KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORLD: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia, by Simon Garfield According to Denis Diderot, perhaps the most famous encyclopedist of the 18th century, the goal of an encyclopedia is “to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” More than 270 years later, the size of that task grows still, as new knowledge continues to be created. In “All the Knowledge in the World , ” Simon Garfield offers a delightful curated sampling of what seekers before and after Diderot have tried to actualize. In a nod to the usual organization of its print subject, the book’s content — a playful history of the genre — is arranged in alphabetical order (“Backstory,” “Chalcenterocity,” “Damask Silk,” etc.). From Pliny the Elder’s “Naturalis Historia” in the first century A.D. to Wikipedia in this one, the desire to gather, organize and link human knowledge has, by Garfield’s count, long mirrored a drive for a complete omniscience. For centuries, … [Read more...] about Everything, Everywhere, in One Big Book