news

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/mar/04/europe-live-news-us-military-aid-ukraine-peace-talks-russia

Oh he is a sad dog, didn't last a day.

A number of schools in Hunan, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces in China have recently started implementing a new policy of 2-day off week for high schoolers, and have sparked quite a debate among parents and netizens in China.

• High schoolers in Grade 10 and 11 will now get 2 days off per week, and Grade 12 students get to have 1 day off every week.
• Currently, there is no weekend for many high schoolers in China (the “higher ranking” a school, the tougher the routine), you get half a day off per week (~2 days off per month).
• A typical high school day looks like this: wakes up at 6am, arrives at class room at 7am, starts morning self-study routine, sits through the classes, stays for the evening self-study session, gets home at around 10pm, and if you’re lucky, gets to bed at around 12am. Rinse and repeat every day.
• As anticipated, many parents are not happy with the new policy: the gaokao (national unified exam) is so competitive that even a 1-point difference in scoring can make or break your chances of getting into university. Some parents in Hangzhou are worried that their kids might be disadvantaged if kids from the other cities don’t have as many days off.
• This has led to an explosive demand for private tuition on the weekends as parents send their kids to tuition classes instead. Previously, tuition was part of the school program and parents pay ~1000 yuan per semester. Now they have to pay an additional 1000-2000 yuan per month.
• Some private tuition companies have seen the business opportunity and have begun advertising “weekend packages” for parents, with such slogans as “you can go to work with a peace of mind. we will take over the duty of the school to take care of your kids instead.”
• One such “weekend package” as reported by the news which includes tuition for 6 subjects + physical education costs 3680 yuan per month, which is 47% of the monthly income for an average household.
• Some parents are now petitioning for the schools to keep their libraries open on the weekend and crowdfunding to pay for the teachers’ “weekend overtime fee”.
• Even more absurdity ensued, as some schools received “letters to volunteer to return to school on the weekends” by “very concerned” students.

China can be a magical place sometimes. The level of extreme competition has intensified in recent years to such an extent that it is taking a toll on everyone’s daily lives, and I don’t blame the people who want to emigrate to Western countries at all. I know many Chinese immigrants overseas who don’t want to put their kids through this.

Investors dare to imagine a world beyond the dollar

Investors are starting to imagine a financial system without the US at its centre, handing Europe an opportunity that it simply must not miss.

This exercise in thinking the unthinkable comes despite a cacophony of noise in markets. Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at Bank of Singapore, recently travelled to clients in Dubai and London. To his surprise, not one of them asked him about short-term issues like tech stocks or tweaks to interest rates. Instead, he says, “people were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ The free trade, free markets, globalisation era is over, and nobody knows what’s going to replace it.”

They refer, of course, to the new US administration. Within a month of retaking his seat at the White House, Donald Trump & co had all but trashed the transatlantic alliance, and ridden roughshod over the key checks, balances and institutions on which true US exceptionalism is built.

“It’s such a momentous change going on. If it continues like this, capital allocators will wonder: ‘Do I want to stay allocated to the US?’” Mohi-uddin says.

This cuts across asset classes. In stocks, the preference for Europe is clear — markets are streaking ahead of the US in a highly unusual pattern. But flighty stock markets are just the surface. The bit that really matters is the international use of the dollar, and dollar bond markets, as the supposedly risk-free bedrock of global finance.

This is already starting to show. On Tuesday, for instance, despite the shock of new US trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the dollar is not climbing in its usual fashion. Deutsche Bank says this in part reflects “the potential loss of the dollar’s safe-haven status”.

“We do not write this lightly,” wrote currencies analyst George Saravelos. “But the speed and scale of global shifts is so rapid that this needs to be acknowledged as a possibility.” What was once outlandish is now becoming plausible.

Economists close to Trump have been clear that they view the dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency as a blessing and a curse — “burdensome” as adviser Stephen Miran put it. It remains a possibility — again unthinkable just a few weeks ago — that the US could seek to pull the dollar lower in an effort to support domestic manufacturing. But the US could also dismantle its own exorbitant privilege through accident rather than design by pushing the big beasts of bond markets — foreign central banks and other official reserve managers — into the arms of other nations.

The dollar makes up more than 57 per cent of global official reserves, according to benchmark data from the IMF, far in excess of the US’s slice of the global economy. The euro accounts for 20 per cent, and everyone else is picking up scraps.

Starry-eyed optimists have argued for years that the euro’s slice of the pie should be bigger, but they have been fighting reality. Europe’s bond markets are fragmented into constituent states, with Germany at the centre. The monetary cohesion is there but not the fiscal or strategic cohesion. No national market is simultaneously large, safe and liquid enough to suit a reserve manager’s needs. Super-sized trades leave a mark and in an emergency, these big hitters find only the slick US government bond market will do.

The EU has struggled to offer an alternative. That is where this moment in history comes in. Its urgent need for defence spending simply overwhelms the capacity of its individual national bond markets. Joint borrowing — easily said but devilishly tricky to do — is the obvious answer. The result could well be that Europe is thrust further to the centre of the global financial system.

The Covid-19 pandemic offered a taste of how pooling resources might work at scale. Then, bonds issued by the EU itself, rather than individual states, were met with enormous demand. The urgency of the present situation offers little choice but to move fast. “Collective action could be an answer, even if consensus has not built yet,” said analysts at rating agency S&P Global in a note last month.

If the EU could seize this moment, it would tap in to a deep well of willing buyers keen to trim US exposure. “Plenty of reserve managers could shift very quickly,” says Mohi-uddin. “There would be huge take-up.” US dominance of global debt markets does not have to end with a bang. Large, slow-moving investors would simply have to accumulate other assets rather than necessarily dumping their Treasuries. But over time, the result would be the same. Regime shifts of this kind do not happen often. But they do happen. Sterling was the global reserve currency once too.

Leave it to Comrade Trump to achieve the impossible, folks.

The question is what are they moving their assets into? Bitcoin and gold? lmao.

Italy: Pope Francis' health condition showed a slight improvement, although his diagnosis requires him to continue to rest.

• Telesur English

Two Alawite families that my mom knows from her university days have been killed in Baniyas. She's in a facebook group with her old classmates and it's just full of obituaries of old people that have been mercilessly slaughtered by the terrorists. I don't know what to say, death just surrounds my people from all angles.

Linking to locked thread as a new thread is excellence.

also kallas saying openly "how can we defeat china" is some next level of diplomacy, too bad everybody has humiliation fetish

Boy Boy just came out with a video where they interviewed an Australian who was tortured repeatedly removed, waterboarded, electric shocked to face and genitals, etc) for six months by the CIA at various US black sites all over the world including Guantanamo Bay. He said the Australian Ambassador to Pakistan was even present at one of the times he was tortured! https://youtu.be/xEqrm9OIqro

what the fuck. He said he saw other captives completely lose their minds and weren't able to recall their own names. They accused him of training the 9/11 hijackers with kungfu which he was a practitioner of.

What is Known About U.S.-Ukraine Minerals Deal So Far? - Telesur English

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Thank you for featuring Greece, this is the biggest strike or protest we've had at least since the fall of the junta, about 1.5 million of people took to the streets, many of them striking for the first time ever