If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: Donald J. Trump doesn’t just have fans, he has voters—and there are a lot of them. In the wake of his commanding victory in the New Hampshire primary, it’s time to take Trump a little more seriously than when he was just the antihero of a reality TV show (the GOP presidential race, that is, not “The Apprentice”).
Last summer, as America fawned over Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the media dismissed them as unelectable—reasonable-seeming bets given Sanders’s socialism and Trump’s chronic offense-giving. But after both took second place in the Iowa caucuses, Sanders and Trump are now on track to win the New Hampshire primaries for their respective parties (or so say the polls). The men have something else in common too: outrage at trade policies that have hurt America’s middle class.
The top dog in the Iowa caucuses didn’t actually win—or even take second. However, Florida senator Marco Rubio came out of nowhere to claim 23.1% of the vote, just shy of Donald Trump’s 24.3%. He’d been expected to nab third place, but until a few days ago, he’d been polling no higher than 13.7% in Iowa, according to Real Clear Politics’ average.
Look around at all the new sushi joints and the lobster roll trucks. We’re taking a heck of a lot of fish out of the sea. Luckily, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which tracks how many we’ve been catching, says catches have remained fairly stable for nearly two decades—a reassuring sign.
The Powerball mania that’s ricocheting around the US has apparently crossed the Pacific. When Wednesday’s lottery drawing takes place at 10.59pm ET, there’s a chance the holder of the ticket that claims the $1.5 billion jackpot—the biggest jackpot in US lottery history—will be in China.
A pair of Australian sea snakes just scored a couple points against the Sixth Extinction. Scientists had given them up for extinct after the two species—the short nose and the leaf scaled sea snakes—disappeared from their homes on the Timor Sea’s tropical reefs more than a decade ago.
Mess with a sperm whale, get an 80-ton torpedo—one that will sink a ship and, like a giant mammalian Jaws, stalk the surviving crew across the ocean. That, at least, is the plot of Ron Howard’s cinematic rendering of In The Heart of the Sea. Based on the 2000 book by Nathaniel Philbrick, it’s a loose retelling of the 1821 sinking of the whaleship Essex, after an enormous sperm whale bashed in its hull with its head. The story eventually helped inspire Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, which describes a whaleship captain’s self-destructive obsession with hunting down the white sperm whale that sank a previous ship and severed his leg.
Americans just keep getting richer. More than one-fifth of American adults now live in ”upper-income” households, up from 14% in 1971 (i.e. three-person households that make more than $126,000 annually, in 2014 dollars), according to a new report by Pew Research Center.
Some of the biggest luminaries of US finance are spearheading an effort to bring the Chinese yuan to America. Michael Bloomberg, founder of the eponymous financial news and data business and former mayor of New York City, will chair the Working Group on US RMB Trading and Clearing, as it’s called. Former US treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner will serve as co-chairmen.
The IMF just named the Chinese yuan to its basket of reserve currencies, a move hailed by many as a sign that the yuan is finally a major global currency, up there with the US dollar, euro, British pound and Japanese yen.
The virulent banana-killing disease that quietly stalked through East and Southeast Asia since the 1960s is now on a global conquest. Since 2013, the lethal fungus has jumped continents, ravaging crops in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia.
Lucky are the few who haven’t gone on a much-needed holiday only to spend their vacation hugging a box of tissues in a bed-bound Theraflu blur. So commonly do people seem to fall ill on vacation that some psychologists have christened it ”leisure sickness.” According to a leading hypothesis, during the work crunch that tends to hit right before a vacation, your immune system kicks into overdrive. Once you’re safely en route to your holiday destination, however, it lets down its guard—and a sore throat and stuffy nose soon follow.
The IMF is already clearing a berth in its basket of reserve currencies for the Chinese yuan. Once official, the yuan will be the first new currency to be added to the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) currency basket since the modern SDR system began in 1981. (The euro replaced the Deutsche mark and the French franc in 1999). The Wall Street Journal hails the approval (paywall) as a “milestone in China’s efforts to establish the country as a global economic power.”
When big fish that dominate the seas suddenly disappear, small fish take over—and stay on top for hundreds of millions of years. At least, that’s what happened after a mass extinction some 359 million years ago. Thanks to overfishing, scientists worry it could be happening again.
According to Donald Trump, China is America’s “number one abuser” in matters of international trade. “If you look at the way they take advantage, it’s through currency manipulation,” he said during last night’s Republican debate.
Saturday’s summit between Chinese president Xi Jinping and the president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou was obviously important. After all, it’s the first-ever meeting between the two countries’ leaders after decades of on-again, off-again military tension. Yet it’s hard to pick out what specifically the summit actually changed.
Jim Chanos, the famed short-selling hedge fund manager who has been bearish on the Chinese economy since 2009, has recommended betting against Alibaba.
Chinese president Xi Jinping just declared that China will grow an average of 6.5% a year from 2016 until 2020. The announcement comes as part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan—that throwback to hoary socialist planning that lays out the country’s blueprint for economic and social development—in which Xi vows to, by the end of the decade, double China’s 2010 per capita GDP (link in Chinese).
Researchers from Peking University and Baidu, the largest search engine in China by far, have drawn on Baidu’s very big data to find the ghostliest cities in the country.
Hawaiian mosquitoes have been busy it seems. Local health authorities just confirmed 10 new cases of dengue fever, an excruciating disease nicknamed ”breakbone fever.” That brings the total to 23 so far this year.
To many, China’s announcement of better-than-expected 6.9% GDP growth for the third quarter confirmed a growing conviction. No, not that China’s economy was hardier than it seemed. Rather, that the Chinese government’s GDP data are more or less made up.
“Wild” is the watchword these days for health-conscious and sustainability-minded Americans when choosing which kind of salmon to eat—the assumption being that unless it is labeled as such, it is likely to have been farmed, very possibly in a cramped pen where it was pumped with antibiotics and pesticides.
One of the planet’s exemplars in preventing climate change, the European Union has instituted tough emissions rules and strong support for renewable energy. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean more solar panels or wind turbines dotting Europe’s skyline. Nope, the EU’s biggest source of renewable energy is old-school: burning wood.
China’s 6.9% third-quarter GDP growth was way stronger than pretty much anyone expected. But by another measure of output, growth looks less impressive. In nominal terms, the Chinese economy only expanded 6.2% last quarter, its pokiest pace since 1999.
