Gwynn Guilford

Out of every “third plenum”—that key Communist Party meeting when a new administration sets its economic agenda—the Party usually published two documents: a “communique” that broadcasts the leadership’s administrative philosophy and the “decision” charting how it will be enacted. While the communique put out on Tuesday (Nov. 12) astonished China-watchers with its vagueness, the 60-point “decision” released earlier today explains reforms more concretely. Some hail it as the “boldest reform in decades.”

The Chinese Communist Party just announced that it is loosening its one-child policy, allowing most of the remaining couples in the country who were restricted to one child to have two. That’s great and all. But it comes way too late to fix the huge glitches in China’s economic growth model that its family-planning policies created—namely, its yawning gender imbalance and rapidly aging population.

China’s got the bitcoin bug. A real estate developer in Shanghai just announced that it’s now accepting bitcoins for one of its mid-range flats in a posh Shanghai suburb. That’s after a unit of Baidu, China’s leading search engine, announced it would accept bitcoins in mid-October. Half of the world’s daily bitcoin trading volume now comes from China, according to the Genesis Block, a research firm that follows bitcoin. (That’s a trend we called back in April.) Moves in the yuan-bitcoin exchange rate are now a leading indicator of dollar-bitcoin price spikes, reports the Genesis Block:

The time for Americans to clean out some fridge space before Thanksgiving may have come a little early this year. Butterball, the US’s top maker of Thanksgiving turkeys, is having some problems delivering the bigger birds to stores around the country.

Since the great gold crash of March 2013, it’s been tough times for the yellow metal. A troy ounce of gold is now worth 22% less than it was in January. Despite voracious bottom-feeding from China that continued in Q3, gold demand fell 21% last quarter, compared with Q3 2012, says the World Gold Council, which cited people selling shares in gold exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as the biggest reason.

Kites, paper, explosives, the compass, movable type—those were all invented in China. But after several millennia of dazzling the world with innovation, China’s technological brilliance has dimmed. For the Chinese government, that’s become an issue of national pride. It now plans to become an “innovation-oriented nation” by 2020 and a “world science and technology power” by around 2050, according to a report by Nesta (pdf, p.19), the UK’s innovation foundation. The report notes that local governments subsidize patent costs and slash corporate taxes for companies that generate numerous patents. And for managers at state-owned enterprises, hitting government-set patent application targets is critical to earning promotions.

The numbers: Fine, which is a big improvement on the last two quarters. Q3 net income for Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry—or Foxconn, as it’s better known—crept up 1.6% on a year earlier, to NT$30.8 billion (US$1 billion). That was slightly less than the year-on-year rise in Q2. Sales, however, rose 5% on a year before, and that’s a healthy jump compared with the wan 0.4% year-over-year increase in Q2, or the 19% drop in Q1. (Foxconn announces earnings tomorrow; its Q3 net income is based on a filing to the Taiwan Stock Exchange made today. It announced unaudited Q3 sales on Oct. 9.)

Like the rest of its population, Japan’s hunter ranks aren’t just aging—they’re also shrinking. Since 1970, Japan’s hunter numbers have fallen by more than half, as Japan Times reports. And of the 200,000 or so remaining, 65% are men over the age of 60.

For any new Chinese administration, the third plenary meeting of the Communist Party’s new Central Committee is the big one—historically, the meeting that sets the themes and tempo of a new leadership’s economic policies. The third plenum under president Xi Jinping has just closed, and as we wrote last week, expectations ran high. But not just for the party; as renowned China scholar Barry Naughton recently explained, Xi’s own credibility was on the line:

Florida’s 1,197-mile (1,926 km) long coast line has long been some of the hottest real estate in the country for retirees and beach lovers. Billions worth of those homes are likely to soon be underwater—and not in the real estate sense.

Last year, just as the Chinese government’s new administration was heralding its commitment to stamping out corruption, profiles of the personal wealth and connections of top leaders—one by the New York Times, the other by Bloomberg—exposed the hypocrisy of that goal. The Communist Party has since denied visas to new journalists, blocked the New York Times’s and Bloomberg’s websites, and generally created headaches for foreign media.

Chinese official banquet culture entails a brand of hard-drinking that makes American frat parties look like wine tastings. Refill after refill, banquet attendees urge each other to “ganbei”—”dry your glass”—as a way of building up relationships. Refusing a toast, which is usually baijiu (rice-based grain alcohol), is a big no-no. The pressure is so great that even Jon Huntsman, the Mormon former ambassador to China, supposedly imbibed while in China, relaxing his religion’s ban on liquor to ease cultural differences.

Singapore is notorious for rigidly managing its citizens’ conduct. But in some cases, they don’t necessarily mind—or even welcome it. Earlier today, the government blocked access to the Singaporean site of Ashley Madison, a Canadian-owned online dating site for married people who want to cheat. (The tagline of the site, which has 20 million users globally, is “Life is Short. Have an Affair.”)

Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines this morning, lashing the country’s central islands with gusts of up to 235 mph (378 kph). The storm is expected to impose $14 billion in losses on the Philippines’ economy, less than $2 billion of which is insured, reports Bloomberg.

Something quite nasty is showing up on Costa Rican docks these days: the spinal columns of butchered sharks, with three fins dangling from them. This mutilation is happening enough that Costa Rican authorities alerted Interpol to warn other countries about this gruesome tactic.

China’s finally starting to reckon with the health consequences of decades of pollution. An official at the top economic planning agency just acknowledged pollution’s toll on people’s mental and physical health. But for many, that’s too little too late. Such as for China’s youngest lung cancer patient (link in Chinese), an 8 year old girl. And for the 40 million people between 20 and 40—about 12.5% of that population—who have fertility problems.

Of all the creatures in the world, the Irukandji is among the most fearsome. It’s about as easy to spot as a floating sliver of cellophane. But a mere human brush with these tiny creatures causes hearts to fail and blows out blood vessels in the brain. Even those that survive are racked with suffering so extreme that it’s been given its own name (“Irukandji syndrome”). Fortunately for most, these little guys don’t travel outside a shred of the ocean in northern Australia.

Times haven’t been easy for the world’s aspirational billionaires. A net of only 10 people around the globe joined the nine-figure club between July 2012 and June 2013, an increase of 0.5%, according to a new study by Wealth-X, a research firm, and UBS, an investment bank. (While more than 10 people around the world became billionaires, 29 Europeans fell back to mere millionaire status.)

The March 2011 earthquake/tsunami that ravaged the coast of central Japan is most notorious for killing 19,000 people and triggering a radioactive meltdown. Surging as far as 6 miles (10 kilometers) inland and flooding around 217 square miles (561 square kilometers), the tsunami also splintered thousands of fishing boats, knocked out houses and sucked away anything that wasn’t bolted to the ground.

Gasping for oxygen in the noxious air that so often enshrouds northern China is never pleasant. What really twists the knife is that the state media often refer to it simply as “fog,” not pollution, as though it came wafting in on a zephyr, and wasn’t belched by a smokestack in Hebei.

There’s more plastic floating around the ocean than any other type of marine debris—that we know. What’s harder to figure out is just how much is out there. A recent survey of marine plastic debris found something surprising: Nearly 99% of it was missing.

In the wake of a spate of health scares, worries about animal welfare and a trade tussle with Russia, demand for Australia’s kangaroo meat has tumbled. Fortunately, kangaroo product peddlers have an alternative: Chinese zeal for virility enhancing supplements made from kangaroo testicles. Chinese buyers are sizing up investment in the kangaroo testicle processing business, reports the Sunday Mail.

The Swedes and the Swiss generally enjoy a sterling reputation in China. The Middle Kingdom can’t get enough of Ikea, H&M and Volvo. And once the new administration’s crackdown on luxury goods calms down, wealthy Chinese will be united once again with their beloved Swiss watches.

This post has been corrected.