With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘Red Note’ Some say they joined Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book,” to spite the US government after a ban on TikTok became more likely. Jan 13, 2025, Wired 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 As TikTok anxiously awaits a Supreme Court decision that could determine whether it will be banned in the United States, users are preemptively fleeing the app and migrating to another Chinese social media platform called Xiaohongshu, which literally means “little red book” in Mandarin. As of Monday, Xiaohongshu was the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store, despite the fact that it doesn’t even have an official English name. The second app on the list is Lemon8, another social media app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, that is also experiencing a traffic surge from exiled TikTok users. Over the weekend, thousands of people began swarming to Xiaohongshu, which is known in China as a platform for travel and lifestyle content and has over 300 million users. The newcomers, who refer to the app as “Red Note” or “the Chinese version of Instagram” and call themselves “TikTok refugees,” are relying on translation tools to navigate Xiaohongshu’s mostly Chinese ecosystem. Some say they are hoping to rebuild communities they had on TikTok, while others say they joined the app out of spite and to undermine the US government’s decision to ban TikTok “I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday. There are a countless number of similar clips in which TikTok refugees introduce themselves and explain why they decided to come to Xiaohongshu, many raking up thousands of likes and comments each. A spokesperson for Xiaohongshu could not immediately be reached for comment. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Friday from TikTok and the US government, which respectively made their cases for and against a law passed last year that would force TikTok to sell its US operations or be banned by January 19. Experts said the justices appeared to think the law was constitutional and would likely allow it to stay, leaving many users feeling that the app’s days are numbered. While TikTok is unlikely to immediately disappear from the phones of people who have already downloaded it, it could be deleted from US app stores, causing many to panic and look for the next place to go.

What's the latest on the Los Angeles wildfires and what caused them? Jan 13, 2025, BBC 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 At least 24 people have died in the Los Angeles fires as two major blazes continue to burn across the sprawling Californian city. Firefighters had made progress by Sunday - containing one smaller fire and nearly containing another - but the two largest blazes are still raging. With strong winds expected to continue until Wednesday, the fire threat remains "very high", LA county officials said. The fires are being marked as the most destructive in the city's history with officials warning the death toll could rise. Cadaver dogs and crews are continuing to search the scorched rubble of razed homes in neighbourhoods. What's the latest? The largest fire, in the Palisades, has now burnt through more than 23,000 acres although thousands of firefighters have made some progress in containing about 11% of it. Crews were doing "everything they can" to stop its spread, said LA City Fire Chief Kristin Crowley on Sunday. The blaze was moving east, threatening the exclusive neighbourhood of Brentwood, home to the Getty Center, a world-famous art museum that has now evacuated its staff. Students at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles were also awaiting updates from officials, while classes are being held remotely. Chief Crowley said favourable winds on Saturday had helped, but warned northerly gusts up to 50mph (80km/h) and low humidity were expected on Sunday. A red flag warning - indicating a high level of fire danger - will be in place until 18:00 (02:00 GMT) on Wednesday, with the strongest Santa Ana winds expected on Tuesday. 16 of the dead were found in the Eaton fire zone, while eight were found in the Palisades area. Another 16 people are reported as missing. As of Sunday, more than 105,000 people were under evacuation orders in Los Angeles County, while another 87,000 face warnings. Those numbers have decreased since Saturday. More than 12,000 structures - homes, outbuildings, sheds, mobile homes and cars -have been destroyed including 7,000 in the Eaton fire. The Palisades fire has destroyed about 5,300 structures, including at least 426 houses. Following reports of looting, authorities say they're also enforcing a curfew from 18:00 local time (02:00 GMT) to 06:00 within the areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires. Police have so far made 29 arrests - 25 in the Eaton fire area and four in the Palisades fire zone. These included two individuals caught posing as firefighters and entering properties. On Saturday night, police arrested one person for curfew violation in the Palisades and six people in Eaton - three for violating curfew and three for additional charges, including carrying a concealed firearm and narcotics-related charges.

Justin Trudeau leaves a wrecked party and divided Canada Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland are among those tipped as the next Liberal leader Jan 6, 2025, The Economist 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 On January 6th Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announced his resignation after weeks of speculation and a mounting political crisis. The Liberal Party has won three successive elections since 2015 under his leadership. But over the past year he has become an isolated and deeply polarising figure as supporters have abandoned the party, angry that it has failed to tackle inflation, housing costs and the strains from high immigration. In the coming weeks the Liberals will be gripped by a leadership struggle. Canada faces an election which must be held by October. It will be fought over his deeply flawed legacy, and how the next government responds to a looming trade war, geopolitical risks and a sluggish economy. “This country deserves a real choice in the next election,” Mr Trudeau said. “It has become clear to me that if I am having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.” He joins a growing list of progressive leaders done in by their failure to address the anxieties of ordinary voters, many of whom are shifting to populist parties. Among those crowing over his exit will be President-elect Donald Trump whose contempt has been laid bare recently in a stream of social media posts, dismissing Mr Trudeau as the “governor” of “the Great State of Canada”, and urging Canadians to consider becoming the 51st member of the United States. The rampant Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, will be watching who the Liberals pick next, and eyeing a landslide election victory.

Capitalism Killed Squid Game Dec 26th, 2024, TIME 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 In an early episode of Squid Game 2, the series’ working-class hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is summoned to a dance club on Halloween night. Weaving among revelers dressed as sexy nurses, cops, and skeletons, he eventually spots the masked figure he’s been pursuing, clad in the hot-pink tracksuit of a Squid Game guard. The scene may well be a nod on the part of creator Hwang Dong-hyuk to the ubiquity of Squid Game Halloween costumes in 2021, when the holiday fell roughly six weeks after Netflix’s Korean megahit debuted and quickly became the platform’s most-watched series of all time. Regardless of Hwang’s intentions, the immediate connection that fans will surely make between this moment and the show’s instant commodification speaks to how drastically the latter phenomenon has shifted its meaning. Squid Game—you know, the blood-spattered thriller about how capitalism pits desperate people against one another in a battle royale for the entertainment of depraved elites—has been a brand for as long as it has been a global sensation. Viewers buy Squid Game merch, pay to participate in Squid Game simulations, and tune in to Squid Game spin-off reality competitions. When you consider that the show is a product of the world’s biggest streaming service, this trajectory is as predictable as it is ironic. But now, as the long-awaited second of three planned seasons premieres, it’s clear that the Squid Game-industrial complex has undermined Squid Game the work of political art, in ways both tangential to Hwang’s storytelling and intrinsic to it. When we last saw Gi-hun, the guilt-ridden victor had been en route to the airport to reunite with his young daughter in the U.S. when he spotted Squid Game’s recruiter (Gong Yoo) approaching new victims in a subway station and realized he couldn’t just walk away with his 45.6 billion won. So much for a fresh start. In a brief intro to the Season 2 premiere, Gi-hun leaves the airport, vows to find Squid Game’s mysterious masterminds “no matter what it takes,” and cuts out the tracking device they inevitably implanted under his skin. Two years later, he’s holed up in the seedy Seoul hotel that has become his personal fortress, still obsessed with taking down the monsters who made him rich. To that end, he’s paying a sketchy search party millions to scour the transit system for the White-Rabbit-esque recruiter. Meanwhile, police detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) has recovered from an attempted murder at the hands of his older brother, In-ho (Lee Byung-hun). His Season 1 search for that sibling, who’d disappeared years earlier, led him to Squid Game island, where In-ho revealed to Jun-ho that he was the deadly playground-game tournament’s diabolical Front Man—and then shot Jun-ho after he refused to join In-ho in the annual slaughter of 455 unwitting debtors. Now a disillusioned traffic cop, Jun-ho gets drawn into Gi-hun’s unofficial investigation, which sends Gi-hun to the arena for Squid Game 2024 as Jun-ho and his motley team try to follow him and end the game forever. Like the castaways of Lost, they have to go back to the island. It takes too long—two plodding episodes out of just seven this season—to get them there. As it stalls, the show unnecessarily reiterates Gi-hun’s broadsides against the bored billionaires for whom Squid Game is a spectator sport and burns time on characters who don’t end up being especially important. Once Gi-hun is back in his green tracksuit, we meet the new players who give the season its emotional stakes, but the plot feels too much like a rehash of Season 1: play, murder, rage, repeat. (In that sense, Squid Game 2 is extremely similar to another super-popular death-game sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.) It’s pure fan service when the giant, creepy robot doll Young-hee returns for another round of Red Light, Green Light. Yes, there are new games, but their candy-colored, nursery-rhyme-soundtracked killing fields aren’t meaningfully different from the violent spectacles viewers saw last time. Once the games have begun, Jun-ho’s search for the island becomes an afterthought. And the finale’s cliffhanger ending is so abrupt, it leaves the disjointed season feeling frustratingly unfinished.

Gen AI Has Already Taken the World by Storm. Just Wait Until It Gets a Quantum Boost May 13, 2024, Time Magazine 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 When Lawrence Gasman was looking for a PhD topic back in the 1970s, computing labs were already abuzz with smart people proposing clever studies in artificial intelligence. “But the problem was we had nothing to run them on,” he says. “The processors needed just didn’t exist.” It took half a century for computing power to catch up with AI’s potential. Today, thanks to hi-powered chips such as GPUs from California-based Nvidia, generative artificial intelligence, or Gen AI, is revolutionizing the way we work, study, and consume entertainment, empowering people to create bespoke articles, images, videos, and music in the blink of an eye. The technology has spawned a bevy of competing consumer apps offering enhanced voice recognition, graphic design, and even coding. Now AI stands poised to get another boost from a radical new form of computing: quantum. “Quantum could potentially do some really remarkable things with AI,” says Gasman, founder of Inside Quantum Technology. Rather than relying on traditional computing’s binary “bits”—switches denoted as 1s and 0s—quantum use multivariant “qubits” that exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, akin to a coin spinning in midair. The result is exponentially boosted computing power as well as an enhanced ability to intuitively mimic natural processes that rarely conform to a binary form. Whereas Gen AI’s consumer-targeted applications have made its impact more widespread and immediate, quantum is more geared towards industry, meaning several recent milestones have slipped under the radar. However, they stand to potentially turbocharge the AI revolution. “Generative AI is one of the best things that has happened to quantum computing,” says Raj Hazra, CEO of Colorado-based quantum start-up Quantinuum. “And quantum computing is one of the best things to happen to the advance of generative AI. They are two perfect partners.”

Jimmy Carter: From peanut farmer to one-term president and Nobel winner Dec 30, 2024, BBC 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, swept to power promising never to lie to the American people. In the turbulent aftermath of Watergate, the former peanut farmer from Georgia pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and became the first US leader to take climate change seriously. On the international stage, he helped to broker an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, but he struggled to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After a single term in office, he was swept aside by Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, winning just six states. Having left the White House, Carter did much to restore his reputation: becoming a tireless worker for peace, the environment and human rights, for which he was recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize. The longest-lived president in US history, he celebrated his 100th birthday in October 2024. He had been treated for cancer and had spent the last 19 months in hospice care. James Earl Carter Jr was born on 1 October 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children. His segregationist father had started the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse. Carter's experience of the Great Depression and staunch Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy. A star basketball player in high school, he went on to spend seven years in the US Navy - during which time he married Rosalynn, a friend of his sister - and became a submarine officer. But on the death of his father in 1953, he returned to run the ailing family farm. The first year's crop failed through drought, but Carter turned the business around and made himself wealthy in the process. He entered politics on the ground floor, elected to a series of local school and library boards, before running for the Georgia Senate. Civil rights campaigner American politics was ablaze following the Supreme Court's decision to desegregate schools. With his background as a farmer from a southern state, Carter might have been expected to oppose reform - but he had different views to his father. While serving two terms in the state Senate, he avoided clashes with segregationists - including many in the Democratic party. But on becoming Georgia governor in 1970, he became more overt in his support of civil rights. "I say to you quite frankly," he declared in his inaugural speech, "that the time for racial discrimination is over."

Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero The support for the alleged shooter is rooted in an American tradition of exalting the outlaw. 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Dec 13, 2024, The New Yorker He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and they worried about him when he fell off the grid, some months ago. His reading and podcast habits, as gleaned from his Goodreads account and other traces of his online footprint, can be summed up as “declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism,” according to Max Read, who writes on tech and Internet culture. In other words, a typical-enough diet for a contemporary twentysomething computer-science guy, and certainly not the stuff of alarm. He is, by consensus, handsome, and jacked. “Holy happy trail, Batman!” Stephen Colbert enthused, over an en-plein-air portrait of a shirtless and beaming Luigi Mangione, who was briefly America’s most wanted man, and perhaps still is. “You know that guy’s Italian, because you could grate parmesan on those abs,” Colbert went on. (His fellow late-night host Taylor Tomlinson was more succinct: “Would.”) In his mug shot, Mangione, chiselled and defiant, appears ready for his closeup in a reboot of “Rocco and His Brothers.” He wears a hoodie well. On Monday night, a friend texted me a photograph of police escorting a dramatically backlit Mangione to his arraignment, and added, “Even the cops are trying to get him acquitted.” Last week, Internet citizens were making dark, cathartic jokes about the fatal shooting, on December 4th, in Manhattan, of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, which is the insurance arm of the world’s largest health-care company. Now that Mangione has been provisionally identified as Thompson’s assailant, and has been arrested and charged with Thompson’s murder, the terminally online are decorating Mangione’s picture with glittery graphics and heart emojis, sharing fancams of Mangione scored to Charli XCX’s “Spring Breakers,” and editing Mangione into time-stamped snapshots to try and provide him with an alibi.

‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024 Dec 2, 2024, Oxford University Press 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Why ‘brain rot’? ‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”. Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024. The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” The term has taken on new significance in the digital age, especially over the past 12 months. Initially gaining traction on social media platform—particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities—’brain rot’ is now seeing more widespread use, such as in mainstream journalism, amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content. In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.

Donald Trump 2024 TIME Person of the Year 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Dec 12, 2024, Time Magazine Mar-a-Lago was quiet three days before Thanksgiving. Donald Trump’s Moorish palace seemed all but deserted late that morning, the seaside estate’s cavernous living room traversed intermittently by a junior staffer or silent aide. Totems to Trump were displayed everywhere. Framed magazines with him on the cover hung by the front door. On a table near the fireplace sat a cast-bronze eagle awarded him by the singer Lee Greenwood. In the men’s lavatory, a picture of him with Arnold Palmer hung near the urinals. Adorning a wall in the library bar, a painting titled The Visionary depicted Trump in a tennis sweater, trim and youthful. The empty rooms felt less like a millionaire members’ club than a museum. By midafternoon, the President-elect’s imminent arrival had stirred signs of life. Discreetly placed speakers offered up selections from Trump’s personally curated 2,000-song playlist. A handful of transition honchos and soon-to-be Administration officials arrived, perching on overstuffed sofas and huddling in corners. Incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles conferred with Trump’s designated National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz. Vice President–elect J.D. Vance strode in with a retinue of staffers. An aide posted up near a window overlooking the patio, setting down Trump’s personal cell phone, which lit up occasionally with calls and texts from favored media personalities and Cabinet picks. You could sense Trump before you could see him, the small group of senior aides rising to their feet in anticipation. The world’s most powerful man entered with an air of unhurried bonhomie. Dressed in his trademark navy suit and red tie, Trump, 78, appeared a little older than he had some seven months earlier, when he last met with TIME—more subdued, less verbose, the same discursive speech patterns but with the volume turned down. Sitting under bright lights for a 30-minute photo session ahead of a 65-minute interview, he’s asked to explain the bruising on his right hand. “It’s from shaking hands with thousands of people,” he says. Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations. Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history. He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom, the first former President to be convicted of a crime—a fact that did little to dampen his support. An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July. Over the next four months, he beat not one but two Democratic opponents, swept all seven swing states, and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He has realigned American politics, remaking the GOP and leaving Democrats reckoning with what went awry. Trump has a ready explanation for his improbable resurrection. He even has a name for its climactic final act. “I called it 72 Days of Fury,” he says as the interview gets under way. “We hit the nerve of the country. The country was angry.” It wasn’t just the MAGA faithful. Trump harnessed deep national discontent about the economy, immigration, and cultural issues. His grievances resonated with suburban moms and retirees, Latino and Black men, young voters and tech edgelords. While Democrats estimated that most of the country wanted a President who would uphold the norms of liberal democracy, Trump saw a nation ready to smash them, tapping into a growing sense that the system was rigged. If America was craving change, it is about to see how much Trump can deliver. He ran on a strongman vision, proposing to deport migrants by the millions, dismantle parts of the federal government, seek revenge against his political adversaries, and dismantle institutions that millions of people see as censorious and corrupt. “He understands the cultural zeitgeists,” says his 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who remains a close adviser. “Donald Trump is a complicated person with simple ideas, and way too many politicians are the exact opposite.”

From doctor to brutal dictator: the rise and fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad Toppled president came to power keen to show he was different from his father but proved to be as repressive Dec 8, 2024, The Guardian 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 On the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 presented a starkly different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder. He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality. For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and later married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path. Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever visible apparatus of repression. Visiting Damascus that year before Bashar’s state visit to the UK, arranged by the then prime minister, Tony Blair – the high point of that engagement – I was invited for a private coffee with Assad, who sat on a white sofa in an expensively tailored suit. Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel. It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s brief embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to transform Hafez’s Syria into something more like a version of Jordan’s paternalistic royal family. More manicured. Certainly more PR-savvy. A dictatorship all the same. In the midst of the conversation, however, Bashar proffered a chilling and almost throwaway line as he reflected on the previous year’s 9/11 attack on the US by al-Qaida and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan. The world should know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been “right” all along in his brutal crushing of Islamist insurgents.

Brian Thompson’s killing inspired rage – against the healthcare industry Thousands of Americans go bankrupt, lose their homes or die every year due to medical insurer practices Dec 7, 2024, The Guardian 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 The killing appeared so well-planned that at first glance many assumed it was a professional hit. The gunman who shot dead Brian Thompson, head of one of the US’s largest health insurance companies, on a New York street before dawn lay in wait with a weapon fitted with a silencer, kept his cool as his gun jammed and made a nimble escape after ensuring that his victim had been fatally struck. However, within hours, an intense police manhunt turned up a trail of clues and possible mistakes, suggesting that while the killer had taken care to cover his tracks, he also made amateurish missteps that may yet lead to his identification and capture. But millions of Americans were less interested in the mechanics of what New York’s new police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, called “a premeditated, pre-planned, targeted attack” than the possible motive. Despite the fact the killer’s motive remains completely unknown, the death of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO unleashed an eruption of anger from people mistreated, or untreated, by the US’s rapacious medical industry and even a grim schadenfreude from some at Thompson’s death. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are driven into bankruptcy every year by medical debts, with many of them losing their homes. Thousands die because insurance companies find reasons not to pay for treatment, including UnitedHealthcare, which denies about one-third of claims. Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer at the Columbia School of Social Work, spoke for many in a post on X. “Today, we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gunned down.... wait, I’m sorry – today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires,” he wrote. The revelation that shell casings at the scene were marked with the words “deny” and “defend” and “depose” added weight to speculation that the killer had had a vendetta against UnitedHealthcare, which earned $280bn in revenue last year insuring about 50 million people in the US. Two of the words are used by the industry in policy documents and were included in the title of a 2010 book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It. Thompson was in New York from UnitedHealthcare’s headquarters in Minnesota for an investor conference. The 50-year-old father of two had been appointed the company’s CEO in 2021 and was paid $10m last year after overseeing a sharp rise in profits to $16bn that some critics said came from using artificial intelligence to routinely reject claims.

The rights and wrongs of assisted dying Britain’s next great social reform is coming. Here’s how it should work Apr 11, 2024, The Economist 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Britain has become a much more liberal country in recent decades. In 1981 only 12% of Britons thought that homosexuality was justifiable, according to the World Values Survey; in 2022 the figure was 66%. Over the same period the proportion of people who were accepting of divorce rose from 18% to 64%. Where the public has led, politicians have followed: same-sex marriages were legalised in 2013; no-fault divorces became possible in 2022. That pattern may well be about to repeat itself with assisted dying. Over two-thirds of Britons support changing the law to let someone help in the suicide of a person with a terminal illness. Assisted dying has a good chance of getting on the statute book in the near future. Bills are already in progress on the Isle of Man, in Jersey and in Scotland. Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, is sympathetic and has promised a free vote among MPs if his party wins the next general election. If The Economist had a vote, it would be unequivocally in favour. The case for assisted dying is, at its core, one of individual freedom. Britons have the right to marry whom they want. They have the right to roam. Through an obscure medieval law, some even have the right to drive sheep across London Bridge. They should have the right to choose the manner and timing of their death. The more complex question is what form an assisted-dying regime should take. That is not just to ensure safeguards against abuses, though it must undoubtedly do that. It is also to make sure that the law is not drawn too tightly. Britain is in many ways late to the issue (as are countries like Ireland and France; a bill was presented to the French cabinet this week). Belgium, the Netherlands, Oregon and Switzerland have had assisted-dying laws for decades. Seventeen jurisdictions have passed laws since we argued in favour of legalisation in 2015. Although opponents of assisted dying have deeply held beliefs, and raise legitimate concerns, the actual experience of these many jurisdictions strengthens the arguments in its favour. Take concerns about coercion. Critics argue that no regime could ever fully protect the vulnerable from relatives looking to claim an inheritance, or indeed from a state seeking to cut health-care costs. Yet the evidence suggests that cases of coercion are extremely rare. The state should do its best to help people live well, whether through social support or palliative care, but if it cannot, those who truly wish to die should not be obliged to suffer. In places where an assisted death remains illegal, only those with money have the option to take matters into their own hands—on average one Briton a week travels to Switzerland to end their life there. The rights of hypothetically vulnerable patients are taking precedence over the rights of those who are actually in anguish. Some critics say that assisted dying is a “slippery slope”. If this is the fundamental reason for your opposition, you are pretty much conceding the principle that there are indeed instances when it would be right to help someone die—it’s the scope that is the problem. In any case experience suggests that no such slope exists. Although eligibility criteria for an assisted death have expanded in Belgium and the Netherlands, they have never done so in jurisdictions whose initial laws were restricted to terminally ill adults. Canada’s decision to postpone the extension of assisted-dying laws to the mentally ill until 2027 shows that it is possible to press “pause”. True, the numbers of people seeking assisted deaths is increasing: they now make up 4% of all deaths in Canada and 5% in the Netherlands. Yet if those higher figures are an expression of people’s desire to make use of a new freedom, as is overwhelmingly likely, they are a reason to pass laws, not to block them.

What has happened in South Korea and what does martial law have to do with it? Dec 4, 2024, CNN 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 South Korea is reeling after a whiplash six hours during which the country’s embattled president declared martial law but was forced to lift it amid widespread condemnation, throwing the country’s political landscape into chaos and uncertainty. The saga began unfolding Tuesday night as most South Koreans prepared to go to sleep – prompting furious lawmakers to force their way past soldiers into parliament to strike down the decree, as protesters demanded President Yoon Suk Yeol’s removal and no return to the country’s painful authoritarian past. By dawn, the president had caved – agreeing to lift martial law. But experts say he’s dug a political grave; opposition parties are already moving to introduce impeachment measures. Questions are still swirling around the future of Yoon’s presidency, his party’s rule, and what happens next in one of the world’s most important economies and a major United States ally. Here’s what we know. What happened? What is martial law? Yoon declared martial law around 10:30 p.m. local time Tuesday in an unannounced late-night TV address, accusing the country’s main opposition party of sympathizing with North Korea and of “anti-state” activities. He also cited a motion by the opposition Democratic Party, which has a majority in parliament, to impeach top prosecutors and reject a government budget proposal. Martial law refers to granting the military temporary rule during an emergency, which the president has the constitutional ability to declare. But the announcement hit like a bombshell, sending shock waves through a democratic nation and sparking an astonishing late-night political showdown.

With his pardon of son Hunter, Joe Biden delivers a heartfelt hypocrisy Dec 2, 2024, The Guardian A loving act of mercy by a father who has already known much sorrow? Or a hypocritical political manoeuvre reminiscent of his great foe? Maybe both can be true. Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he had pardoned his son Hunter, who is facing sentencing in two criminal cases, is likely to have been the product of a Shakespearean struggle between head and heart. On the one hand, Biden is one of the last great institutionalists in Washington. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making,” he said in an unusually direct and personal statement on Sunday. To undermine the separation of powers goes against every fibre of his political being. On the other hand, Biden is nothing without family. His speeches are peppered with references to his parents. As a senator, he once took a train from Washington to Wilmington, Delaware, so he could blow out the candles on a birthday cake for his eight-year-old daughter, Ashley, at the station, then cross the platform and take the next train back to work. Biden was profoundly shaped by the death of his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car accident and, much later, the death of his son Beau from brain cancer. In that context, Hunter’s status as the first child of a sitting president to face criminal charges will have pained his father in what Ernest Hemingway called “the broken places”. Hunter was convicted this summer of lying about his drug use when he bought a gun. Joe Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters: “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.” Hunter also pleaded guilty in a separate tax evasion trial and was due to be sentenced in both cases later this month. Biden reportedly spent months agonising over what to do. The scales were almost certainly tilted by Donald Trump’s victory in last month’s presidential election. The prospect of leaving Hunter to the tender mercies of Trump’s sure-to-be politicised, retribution-driven justice department was too much to bear. Biden typically takes advice from close family and is likely to have reached the decision after talking it over during what was an intimate Thanksgiving weekend.

The mystery of Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s great disrupter He has won and lost fortunes with his bets on technology. So is the investor a visionary — or a gambler who got lucky? Sept 21, 2024, Financial Times 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Late one afternoon in October 2023, as the sun slipped down over Tokyo Bay, Masayoshi Son was sitting in his private office at SoftBank headquarters, at the head of a wooden table almost as long as Vladimir Putin’s in the Kremlin. A diminutive, balding figure dressed casually in a jacket and slacks, Son was recounting to me the low point of his career, a year earlier, when he announced he was disappearing from public view. “What a shitty life!” he exclaimed, with a trace of self-pity. “You know on my Zoom call, I see my face often on the video screen and I hate looking at my face. What an ugly face. I’m just getting old . . . What have I achieved? . . . I have done nothing that I can be proud of.” At face value, it was an astonishing admission. Son, then 66, ranked among the world’s most renowned investors. He invested in ecommerce giants Yahoo and Alibaba before they became household names. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000, he was briefly the richest man in the world. When it burst, he lost 97 per cent of his fortune, around $70bn. But he bounced back, launching a successful broadband and mobile phone business in Japan, propelled by an exclusive deal to distribute Apple’s iPhone. Then he disrupted Silicon Valley with the $100bn SoftBank Vision Fund, and ended up making the biggest swing and miss in the history of investing. (Hence his temporary vanishing act.) As editor of the Financial Times, I’d met Son twice and he intrigued me as a subject for a biography. A compulsive risk taker, his story was a classic entrepreneur’s tale of survival and perpetual reinvention. But was Son a tech visionary or simply an inveterate gambler who got lucky? Why was SoftBank, the company he founded in 1981 as a pioneering software distribution business in Japan, so often described as a house of cards? Answering those questions proved more difficult than I anticipated. Twice I flew to Tokyo, only to be informed that the boss was too busy to see me. When I complained that my subject was more elusive than a Bengal tiger, an ex-SoftBank executive, Indian by birth, replied: “In that case, I suggest you bring a goat.” In western media Son often comes across as a cartoon character. He has compared himself to Yoda in Star Wars; Napoleon (of which more later); and Jesus Christ (who was equally misunderstood, apparently). Obsessed by longevity, he has told friends that he hopes to live past 120, and that SoftBank should be built to last 300 years.