Two men in northern England have the same medical condition, require similar around-the-clock assistance and live roughly 40 miles apart. One has been able to take an overseas trip with his personal assistants, exploring places he might otherwise never see and reclaiming a basic adult experience. The other says he has effectively been unable to…
The Dominican Republic added 147,456 net jobs over the past year, pushing total employment to 5.27 million in the second quarter of 2026. The increase amounts to 2.9% growth compared with the same quarter of 2025, an impressive headline for one of the region’s steadier labor markets. But underneath the growth is a more persistent…
About 71 million Africans ages 15 to 24 are outside employment, education or training. Among young people who do have jobs, informality and working poverty reveal a second problem: employment is not delivering economic mobility. Roughly 70.9 million young Africans ages 15 to 24 were neither employed nor enrolled in education or training in 2025, according…
The Venice Film Festival remains an awards-season launchpad. But fewer major Hollywood productions are creating room for something else: films centered on war, migration, political power and instability. The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opens Wednesday with noticeably less Hollywood product than the event has carried in recent years. Festival director Alberto Barbera attributes the…
Singapore is sharply increasing the financial support attached to raising a child. Its record-low birthrate suggests governments may be confronting a problem money alone cannot reverse. Singapore recorded 27,529 resident births in 2025, down 10.6 percent from the previous year. Its resident total fertility rate fell from 0.97 to a record 0.87 children per woman, less than…
Washington’s proposed “Carolina Principles” turn AI regulation into a competitiveness strategy: fewer new rules, greater reliance on existing regulators, and more room for American technology companies to expand. The United States is asking the world’s largest economies to avoid building broad new regulations or regulatory bodies specifically for artificial intelligence. At a G20 technology gathering…
Cameroon is sending mobile courts into schools to issue birth certificates. The intervention exposes how a missing document can become a barrier years after a child has already entered the education system. More than one million children enrolled in Cameroon’s schools have no birth certificate, leaving many able to attend class but at risk of…
Two decades of agricultural expansion produced more food, higher yields and greater farmer income. A new AGRA review says those gains never became the transformation they were supposed to be. Global Affairs Africa’s agricultural output has roughly doubled in real terms over the past 20 years. Cereal yields are up about 40 percent, farmer incomes…
Women spend nearly six hours a day on unpaid care and domestic work. Parliament is now asking what changes when an economy begins treating that time as economically consequential. Culture in Motion Zimbabwean women spend an average of 5.9 hours a day on committed work — unpaid domestic labor, caregiving and volunteer work — compared…
The legal limits remain. What changes is how hard inspectors will push employers toward the 45-hour benchmark. Labor Beginning Sept. 1, Japan’s Labor Ministry will stop directing inspectors to uniformly push workplaces back under 45 hours of monthly overtime simply because they exceed it. Inspectors will instead assess whether employers are carrying out the health…