Empire Watch

On the mountainous outskirts of Shenzhen, a fast-growing mega-city in China, the largest waste-to-energy plant in the world is on the horizon. You can bet that this disk-shaped trash-burning plant isn’t going to do any wonders for China’s notoriously bad air quality ...
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THE UNITED STATES has the highest incarceration rate in the world. In fact, according to the most recent data, the U.S., while having only 4.5% of the world's population, holds 21 percent of the world's prisoners. The last few years ...
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"The Chinese need to learn that public spaces aren’t garbage dumps", said Raymond Zhou. During a recent national holiday, visitors dropped a staggering 32 tons of litter in Tiananmen Square in just four days. Beijing’s army of street cleaners rushed ...
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These nations have been dismissed as underdogs and weaklings. But like budding superheroes, they’ve been sitting on hidden talents. And now they’re about to fly. 1. FINLAND SUPERPOWER: INVINCIBLE TEACHERS If you’re a kid in Finland, you don’t start school ...
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Along with goods for U.S. markets, China's booming factories are exporting pollution that fouls the air over the Western U.S., a new study has found. "We've outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing ...
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BEIJING - The greatest risk China faces in its historic modernization is the massive imbalance between urban and rural areas, according to the country's top agriculture official. "The most important and difficult task is to resolve issues concerning agriculture, countryside ...
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The smog which suffocates Beijing has gotten so bad that the Chinese media has concluded that something must be done. Poor visibility has led to canceled flights and highway closings. The level of particulates in the air topped 35 times ...
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The frigid continent of Antarctica could prove to be the next location to become a geopolitical battleground, as China announcedthat it is preparing to build its first permanent airfield at the South Pole. The location, about 17 miles away from ...
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China’s wealth gap has widened so much that the country now one of the most unequal outside of sub-Saharan Africa. A respected Chinese institute found this week that China’s Gini coefficient, a number that represents income inequality, has soared from ...
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Prison Sentences - Loosening The Shackles U.S. Prison Population The U.S. prison population is the highest in the world. A quarter of the world's inmates reside in U.S. prisons, despite being only 5% of the world population. Since the 1980's ...
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