THE turn in the US housing market has been sharp and swift. Just ask Karlyn and Jack Stenhjem, would-be downsizers who dropped the asking price for their home near Seattle by almost $100,000 since May.

OUR LAKES, rivers and oceans are increasingly clogged with plastic, plus trillions of microscopic fragments thereof, from all the useful and disturbingly durable products made possible by the petroleum industry.

FOUR DECADES AGO, the Catholic Church inspired the movement that helped overthrow Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. Now, as the autocrat’s son begins his own presidential term, the Church’s sway over politics doesn’t come close.

THERE aren’t many silver linings to be found in the cryptocurrency crash. People have lost money, often those who could least afford it.

REGENT Street, London’s premier shopping thoroughfare, is struggling to shake off the lingering effects of COVID-19.

AS RUSSIA’s invasion of Ukraine wreaks destruction on the fringes of the European Union (EU), the bloc is poised to pull its newest member closer into the fold.

THE WORLD of crypto isn’t just suffering from a market malaise that has seen the price of Bitcoin drop from $69,000 to around $20,000 today — it also faces a troubling number of security risks.

As energy security becomes a growing source of angst, it’s clear that large-scale, reliable use of renewable resources remains a distant reality in many...

THE WORLD has an obsession with Japan’s shrinking population. Each year, news that the country is a little bit smaller can reliably be called upon for column inches, which tend to examine it as a Japanese mystery — one of those inherently Oriental concepts that foreigners could not possibly penetrate, like wabi-sabi or the bushido code of samurai warriors.

TO GET A HANDLE on the forces disrupting the global food supply chain, a small chicken processing plant on the outskirts of Malaysia’s biggest metro area isn’t a bad place to start. There, it’s clear that getting produce from point to point isn’t just a logistics challenge but a matter of national pride.

IT HAS BEEN an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights associated with consciousness.

A SHORTAGE of popular food items from popcorn to sriracha is hitting restaurants and grocery shelves this summer, a sign that the world’s immense supply chains are still under pressure.