Torbjørn Færøvik's Blog, page 136

When Beijing Was China’s Most International City

A newly translated book explores how international residents have shaped and recorded life in China’s ancient capital for hundreds of years.Toward the end of the 13th century, while a guest in the court of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo was stunned by the beautiful grassland enclosed in the imperial palace, which teemed with fruit trees and breeding animals such as deer and goats.Roughly 300 years later

Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit

A few weeks ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year. But President-elect Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.Denmark, for

Trump Already Concentrates Minds On Defense – Analysis

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte addressed the European Parliament last week with a clear message: Europe isn’t spending enough on defense and the new US president will not like it. With Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the issue of defense spending will once again become one of the top issues Europe must grapple with. In his first term, Trump emphasized the lack of defense spending by

Old China: Bound Feet and Bad Smell, by Torbjørn Færøvik

We don't know when Chinese women began binding their feet. It was most likely around 800-900 A.D. The curious custom had to do with marriage, with sex, with beauty - and duty. This is a chapter from my book "Midtens rike" (The Middle Kingdom, Oslo 2024). By Torbjørn Færøvikwriter and historian“Women carry half of the heavens”, says an old Chinese proverb. Reality certainly was not so.

Trump says he 'most likely' will give TikTok a 90-day extension to avoid US ban

President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that he “most likely” would give TikTok 90 more days to work out a deal that would allow the popular video-sharing platform to avoid a U.S. ban. Trump said in an NBC News interview that he had not decided what to do but was considering granting TikTok a reprieve after he is sworn into office on Monday. A law that prohibits

Can Taiwan’s democracy be saved?

In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve

US concerned over damaged cables

The US Department of State has expressed concern over the recent severance of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea and near Taiwan, urging all sides involved to collaborate with investigators. The US is closely following reports of undersea cables being damaged in multiple areas, including in the Baltic Sea and around Taiwan, a US Department of State spokesperson said on Friday in response to

Who is China sending to Trump's inauguration?

China is sending Vice-President Han Zheng to US President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday - the first time a senior Chinese leader will witness a US president being sworn in. Trump had invited Chinese President Xi Jinping, among other leaders - a break with tradition given foreign leaders traditionally do not attend US presidential inaugurations.China has said it wants to work with

Trump’s Panama Canal threats leave country’s officials scrambling for answers

The new Panamanian ambassador was given strict instructions as he prepared to meet then-President Donald Trump one day in 2019: Do not engage him in any substantive discussion of critical issues. This was meant to be a carefully choreographed photo op, nothing more but a brief stop on the diplomatic conveyor belt as foreign ambassadors lined up in the West Wing to formalize their positions atop

A million-dollar challenge to crack the script of early Indians

Every week, Rajesh PN Rao, a computer scientist, gets emails from people claiming they've cracked an ancient script that has stumped scholars for generations. These self-proclaimed codebreakers - ranging from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax officers - are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. All of them are convinced they've deciphered the script of the Indus Valley