Rob Schmitz

From a hill overlooking Canberra, Australia's landlocked capital, Clive Hamilton points to the National Carillon, a bell tower that happens to be striking noon, then to a massive glass and concrete monolith.

"That's where ASIO lives," he says, using the common shorthand for Australia's intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

He then points out Australia's federal police building and to a compound in the middle, where China built its embassy.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un says he will visit Seoul "in the near future," amid an ongoing summit with South Korea's Moon Jae-in in which he also renewed pledges to shut down a primary missile launch site and a key nuclear weapons complex if the U.S. takes "corresponding" measures.

Kim's remarks about traveling to Seoul were made during a news conference in Pyongyang with the South Korean president. It would be the first-ever visit to the South Korean capital by a North Korean head of state.

Farmer Gao Yongfei is paying much closer attention to his more than 5,000 pigs than ever before.

That's because hundreds of pigs at farms nearby are dying from a mysterious virus, and Gao and his staff are now vigilantly checking his herd for symptoms of African swine fever.

"You know the pig is sick if its mouth has turned dark and it's acting crazy," says the 64-year-old owner of Yongfei Livestock Farm. "When you find a pig that has the fever, you need to slaughter it immediately."

At a downtown market in Shanghai, people are hustling to sell their goods. But at this market shaded by trees lining the pathways of People's Park, their goods are their grown children.

"Born in 1985, studied in the U.K., she's short, has a Shanghai residence permit, owns her own apartment," says Mrs. Wang, reading aloud the sign she's taped to an umbrella advertising her unmarried daughter. It's one of hundreds of umbrellas lined up along the park's walkways with similar signs.

It was on a family trip to Japan when Jui-Ting Hsi's patience with her father Kuo-Jen Hsi reached its limit.

The family, on vacation from Taiwan, had filed into a characteristically silent and crowded subway car in Tokyo when the family patriarch began speaking loudly, attracting a few glances from other passengers.

The order came in April. China's government instructed farmers in the country's northeastern breadbasket region to grow more soybeans, calling it "a political priority."

But soybean fields lay empty in the village of Sandaogou, which means "Three Ditches," in Liaoning province. It has been a dry spring.

"We've had a drought this year, so we planted soybeans late. The seedlings should be out by now. We need more rain," says farmer Liu, who only gives her surname for fear of trouble with local authorities. Soy, after all, has become "political."

Each afternoon at 4:30, the train from Pyongyang to Beijing passes over a rickety old bridge spanning the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. North Korean passengers wearing pins bearing the images of past leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il wave to hordes of Chinese tourists who come here, China's northeastern border city of Dandong, to catch a glimpse of the mysterious land across the river.

It's not easy being in charge of foreign relations of a country most of the world refuses to recognize.

Taiwan lost another ally on Thursday. The West African country Burkina Faso became the latest country to cut ties with the island. After the Dominican Republic, that's two in less than one month. And like other countries, including the United States, that for decades have broken diplomatic relations with Taiwan, they did so for one reason: to please China.

China's employers engage in blatant gender discrimination, often advertising jobs for "men only," while others hire women with physical attributes aimed at appealing to their male coworkers, according to a new study published this week by Human Rights Watch.

Dozens of cameras meet visitors to the Beijing headquarters of SenseTime, China's largest artificial intelligence company. One of them determines whether the door will open for you; another tracks your movements.

The one that marketing assistant Katherine Xue is gazing into, in the company's showroom, broadcasts an image of my face with white lines emanating from my eyes, nose and corners of my mouth. It estimates I am a 37-year-old male (I'm 44) with an attractiveness score of 98.

"Trade wars are good, and easy to win," President Trump tweeted earlier this month after announcing heavy tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

The president's claim will soon be tested after he unleashes a raft of tariffs on about $50 billion worth of Chinese exports to the United States in retaliation for China's theft of U.S. technology and trade secrets.

It was March 2007, China's legislature was wrapping up its annual session and Premier Wen Jiabao was about to speak at the closing press conference. The economy was seeing double-digit growth, a consumer class was rising and Beijing was soon hosting its first Olympics — there was every reason for a savvy politician to boast.

But that's not what the Chinese premier did.

"There are structural problems," Wen said ominously into a microphone, "which are causing unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development."

In what will go down as one of the most significant legislative sessions in modern Chinese history, an eye-rolling millennial managed to steal the show from President Xi Jinping, a man who had just been given permission to rule 1.3 billion people for as long as he wants.