The Guardian: East Ukraine: on the frontline of Europe's forgotten war

The unarmed monitoring mission from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) logs hundreds of explosions a day. It is not full-blown war, but it is not much of a ceasefire, either.  [...]

The Russian president accused Kiev of embracing “tactics of terror” and said there was little point in four-way negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France, planned for the sidelines of the upcoming G20 summit in China. This led many to suspect that a new Russian offensive could be on the way, possibly with the aim of opening up a land bridge between Russia and Crimea. [...]

Up to now, Russia has used a mixture of loosely directed volunteers, military advisers and occasional injections of regular troops at key moments, while denying it has ever had a major military presence in east Ukraine. But with Ukraine’s army improving over the past two years, a push for further territory would probably require a full-scale, overt Russian invasion that would irrevocably damage relations with the west. [...]

Moscow is keen for a settlement that would see much of the separatist infrastructure legalised, giving it de facto control over part of Ukraine without having to fund it. In Kiev, attitudes have hardened against any compromise with the “terrorists” in the east. Amid the deadlock, many in Kiev still worry about the possibility of Russia opting for full-scale war. “It doesn’t seem logical but then the things they do often don’t,” said the Ukrainian official.

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BBC: The lonely men of China's 'bachelor village'

But Laoya, which means "Old Duck" village, is known locally as the "bachelor village".

In a survey in 2014 it had 112 men between 30 and 55 registered as single out of a population of 1,600. That is unusually high. [...]

His part of the village is remote but the odds are already against Xiong Jigen. China has far more men than women. There are now around 115 boys born for every 100 girls.

In a culture that historically favours boys over girls the Communist Party government's One Child policy led to forced abortions and a glut of newborn boys from the 1980s onwards. [...]

Men migrate too but it is usually just for work. Some men stay to look after their aging parents, in keeping with the Chinese tradition of filial piety. [...]

President Xi Jinping has spoken about how he believes nothing should get in the way of building a strong, traditional family unit. In Shanghai, new rules came in earlier this year which threaten adult children with punishment if they do not visit their parents.

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The New York Times: A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories

“Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin’s information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”

The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past. [...]

“The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone.’”

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Bloomberg: Winners and Losers in the New China

Most obvious is a deepening gulf between winners and losers. A recent study from Peking University found that China has become one of the most unequal countries in the world. The richest 1 percent of households own a third of total wealth. As the government tries to transition away from coal and steel and toward tech and finance, this divergence is likely to worsen.

In fact, it's already starting to. Regionally, the differences between China's old and new economies couldn't be starker. The rustbelt province of Liaoning, long reliant on steel mills, is now in recession. In finance-focused, high-tech Shenzhen, real-estate prices have risen by more than 60 percent in a year, the fastest rate in the world. [...]

Yet in many ways, China remains a developing country. More than 600 million Chinese -- some 44 percent of the population -- are classified as rural residents, with an average nominal yearly income of $1,620. An urban worker earns nearly three times as much, enjoys better public benefits like schooling, and gets an enormous wealth boost from real-estate appreciation. 

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