Chinese exports are flooding the developing world, and the social consequences are bound to be profound.

The N.B.A. player has been charged in federal court with money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy.

© Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Chinese exports are flooding the developing world, and the social consequences are bound to be profound.

Nepal’s anti-graft watchdog said the state-owned Chinese firm and Nepali officials colluded to inflate the costs of an international airport in Pokhara.

President Trump’s tariffs weren’t enough to hold back the global export flood by China, which pushed past last year’s record in just 11 months.

President Trump’s tariffs weren’t enough to hold back the global export flood by China, which pushed past last year’s record in just 11 months.

© Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Through layers of intermediaries, stablecoins can be moved, swapped and mixed into pools of other funds in ways that are difficult to trace, experts say.

© Jeremy Leung

We need to let go of our legacy print snobbery.

There are no easy answers for the current economic discontent.

Until the Industrial Revolution brought the wide availability of iron, and even well into the twentieth century, the carpenter who worked wonders in wood was one of the key trades. It’s thus odd that remarkably few paintings show carpenters at work, at least until the middle of the nineteenth century.

They also play no role in the best-known classical myths, with the exception of one painting by Piero di Cosimo.

Piero sometimes assembled his own mythical narratives, such as that in Vulcan and Aeolus from about 1490. From the left the figures are a river god, Vulcan forging a horseshoe, a figure (possibly Aeolus, keeper of the winds) riding a horse, a man curled asleep in a foetal position, a couple and their infant son, and four carpenters erecting the frame of a building. Among the animals are a giraffe and a camel. It’s thought this shows early humans developing crafts at the dawn of civilisation.

Christian religious painting has a better opportunity, with Joseph, husband of the Virgin Mary, the most famous carpenter in European history.

Tintoretto’s Annunciation is thought to have been painted in about 1582. Its composition is unusual by any contemporary standards, with natural rendering of brickwork, a wicker chair, and a splendidly realistic carpenter’s yard at the left. This is coupled with an aerial swarm of infants, at the head of which is the dove of the Holy Ghost in a small mandorla. Christ’s origins are here very real, tangible, and contemporary, in stark contrast to most traditional depictions of this scene.

John Everett Millais’ painting of Christ in the House of His Parents, also known as The Carpenter’s Shop, is one of the foundational paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from 1849-50. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850 with a quotation from the Old Testament book of Zechariah 13:6: “And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.” It shows an entirely imagined scene, one not even alluded to in the Gospels, in which the young Jesus Christ is being comforted by his kneeling mother, after he has cut the palm of his left hand on a nail.

It’s rich with symbols of Christ’s life and future crucifixion: the cut on his palm is one of the stigmata, and blood dripped from that onto his left foot is another. The young Saint John the Baptist has fetched a bowl of water, indicating his future baptismal role. A triangle above Christ’s head symbolises the Trinity, and a white dove perched on the ladder is the Holy Spirit. A flock of sheep outside represents the Christian flock.

In William Holman Hunt’s later painting of The Shadow of Death from 1870-73, the young Jesus Christ is seen in his father’s carpentry workshop, holding his arms up to savour the bright sunlight. His cast shadow on the rack of tools and wall behind shows him crucified on the cross, with his mother Mary already on her knees, as shown in so many paintings of the crucifixion.

Christian allusions to carpentry became more popular from the start of the nineteenth century.

William Blake’s The Christ Child Asleep on the Cross, or Our Lady Adoring the Infant Jesus Asleep on the Cross from 1799-1800 is among the few of his glue tempera paintings that has retained its colours. This shows at best an apocryphal if not invented scene, in which the young Jesus anticipates his eventual fate by sleeping on a wooden cross, surrounded by the carpenter’s tools, including compasses or dividers.

Fritz von Uhde’s A Difficult Journey from 1890 imagines Joseph and the pregnant Mary walking on a rough muddy track to Bethlehem, in a wintry European village. Joseph has his carpenter’s saw on his back as the tired couple move on through dank mist.

There’s a more complex story behind Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s People by a Road from 1893. The group at the left are old road-workers, breaking larger rocks into coarse gravel. They lived out under the wooden shelter behind them, as they made their way slowly around the country roads. The woman holds what is either a small shovel or spade used in their work. Standing and apparently preaching to them is a cleanly dressed carpenter, his saw held in his left hand. The building behind them, on the opposite side of the road, is a church, from which a large congregation has just emerged.

This association with the Holy Family may extend to Erik Henningsen’s Evicted from 1892 with its family of four being evicted into the street in the winter snow. With them are their meagre possessions, including a saw suggesting the father may be a carpenter. In the background he is still arguing with a policeman.

It was only then, at the end of the nineteenth century, that artists started to paint portraits of carpenters at work.

In 1891 Laurits Andersen Ring painted these Workers at a Water Pipe at Søndersø, in the north of the central Danish island of Fyn (Funen). Two are skilled carpenters, who are sawing a plank of wood to be used in the construction work in progress behind them. The third worker, in his light blue jacket, wears rubber overboots on his wooden clogs, implying he has been working down in the trench. This is one of a series painted by Ring showing trades and crafts.

A court in the Philippines convicted Alice Guo for trafficking people to a compound that officials have linked to online scams and organized crime.

China and the United States say She Zhijiang, a Chinese-born businessman, ran a major scam compound in Myanmar. He was arrested in Bangkok in 2022.

At an international conference, researchers at the forefront of animal-human transplantation compared notes and allowed themselves the first real optimism in decades.

A trade truce between the United States and China has calmed nerves, but it won’t stop the broader movement of companies to countries like Vietnam.

The two countries agreed to suspend the fees for a year as part of their recent trade pact, but America still aims to build more commercial ships.

Neros, a company founded in 2023 by former teenage drone racers, won a coveted Army contract and is gaining popularity in the defense sector.

A leading German automotive supplier said it was again allowed to ship semiconductors that Beijing had barred for export.

Longevity labs, “immortality islands” and grapeseed pills are part of China’s national project to conquer aging, despite sometimes shaky science and extravagant claims.

Exports of cars, solar panels and batteries remain strong, but prices are falling because of factory overcapacity in China.

Drones, missiles and other crucial components of Europe’s rush to rearm itself rely on an increasingly unsteady supply of minerals from China.

Sirens are mythical woman-like creatures with alluring voices, best-known from their appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, but also featuring in other tales including that of Jason and the Argonauts. Typically their singing lures sailors to their death, and that reputation has led them to represent anything that’s dangerously attractive. Originally they weren’t described in any physical detail, but visual representations soon envisaged them as having the upper bodies of beautiful young women, and the lower bodies and legs of birds, and that has been incorporated and elaborated in later accounts and retelling.

At the end of the year that Odysseus and his crew stayed with the sorceress Circe, she helpfully advised him that he would have to sail past the sirens, two to five creatures who lured men to their death with their singing. In preparation, Odysseus got his sailors to plug their ears with beeswax before they reached the sirens, so they couldn’t hear their song, and to bind him to the mast. He gave them strict instructions that under no circumstances, no matter what he said at the time, were they to loosen his bonds, as he would be listening to the sirens’ song.

As the group reached the sirens, Odysseus told his men to release him, but instead they bound him even more closely to the mast. Once they had passed safely from earshot of the sirens, Odysseus used his facial expression to inform his men, who then released him, and they sailed on.

William Etty’s The Sirens and Ulysses from about 1837 is one of the pioneering accounts in paint of this story from the Odyssey. His three naked sirens are all woman, one playing a lyre, another holding double pipes aloft, all three doing their best to draw the sailors from Odysseus’ ship to a shore where there are the remains of earlier victims.

Edward Poynter’s The Siren from about 1864 has Aesthetic overtones in the lyre she is playing.

Arnold Böcklin takes an unusual approach of almost dereferencing Odysseus in his painting of Sirens from 1875, although there is an approaching vessel that could be his. The two sirens filling the canvas are very human down to the waist, below which they resemble birds. One sits facing us, clearly in full voice, and highly alluring in looks. The other, her back towards us, is playing an aulos and looks rather obese, to the point of almost being comical, her right breast laid upon a flat-topped rock. At their feet are three human skulls and other bones to indicate their graver intentions.

Gustave Moreau’s The Sirens (1882) shows them as beautiful figures in a static scene, with a saturnine setting sun. There is, though, a lone sail on the horizon that hasn’t yet attracted their attention. Their lower legs turn into the writhing coils of sea serpents.

Moreau’s slightly later group portrait of The Sirens from about 1885 is more complete, with Odysseus sailing past, but its three figures are clearly all woman and no bird.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is one of Hans Thoma’s unusual mythological paintings. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

John William Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) is closer to the Homeric account, although he provides a total of seven sirens, shown as large eagle-like birds of prey with only the head and neck of beautiful women. He has added bandage wrappings around the head of each sailor to make it clear that their ears are stopped from hearing sound, a visual device that links neatly with the text. His sirens are clearly singing, particularly the one closest to the viewer, who is challenging the hearing protection of one of the sailors. Another sailor, at the stern of the ship (left of the painting), is seen clutching his ears.

Almost a decade later, Waterhouse painted this non-narrative portrait of The Siren (1900).

The Sirens (1903) marked Henrietta Rae’s return to painting narrative works featuring classical nudes. Odysseus’ ship is in the distance, as three beautiful sirens use their aulos and lyre to lure its occupants.

Late mythology suggests an unpleasant end for these sirens: Hera challenged them to a singing contest against the Muses. When the latter won, the penalty they exacted of the sirens was to have all their feathers plucked out to turn into crowns. As a result of that disgrace, the sirens turned white, fell into the sea, and formed the islands including modern Souda, on the north-west coast of Crete in the Mediterranean.

Sirens have steadily spread their presence into other paintings, particularly during the twentieth century.

Georg Janny’s fantasy painting of Sirens Bathing by the Sea from 1922 is throughly other-worldly, and there’s no trace of their bird legs.

More cryptic is Paul Nash’s Surrealist Nest of the Siren (1930), which brings together the incongruous, and hardly refers to Homer’s story. The painting is framed by brightly-painted walls with pillared decorations, perhaps ornate wainscot panelling. In the middle of these is what might be a painting, but also seems to be a three-dimensional plant trough containing sinuous shrubs. In the middle of those is a small nest, like an acorn cup.

Standing in front of this is a structure resembling a weather-vane, mounted on a turned wooden shaft. At the weather end of the vane is the faceless figure of a siren; the leeward end appears purely decorative. Three red rods appear to have detached themselves from the walling, two protruding from the plant trough, the third resting on the floor.

They even manage to sneak symbolically into other classical stories.

In Girodet’s ink and chalk drawing of The Meeting of Orestes and Hermione (c 1800), Hermione is seen at the right, her arms folded, looking coy as Orestes approaches her. The second woman, with Orestes, is presumably Hermione’s maid. This is one of a series of illustrations made by Girodet to accompany Racine’s play, and has subtleties you might expect from a great narrative artist. Visible in the gap between the figures is a table-leg in the form not of a Fury foretelling Orestes’ fate, but of a siren, implying that Hermione is luring Orestes to her. Hermione, for all her apparent coyness, has let the right shoulder-strap of her robe slip, in her enticement of Orestes. She has assumed the role of femme fatale, as portrayed by Euripides and Racine.

In more recent literature, sirens appear in the less-known second part of Goethe’s play Faust.

Margret Hofheinz-Döring is one of the few artists who has painted from this second part. With the Sirens from 1962 is her pastel painting showing the sirens among rocky inlets of the Aegean Sea, a sub-scene concluding the second act.

Two economists on the price of playing nice with a superpower.

As he so often does, the president is pushing the wrong answer to the right question on trade policy with Beijing.

Two decades of sustained effort to build national self-reliance and minimize imports have antagonized trade partners but fortified what a senior adviser called Beijing’s “bulwark” against conflicts.

The leaders of Canada and China met for the first time in eight years to try to reset relations after years of acrimony.

Xi now sees our weakness and will try to exploit it, perhaps leaving America a diminished presence in Asia.

China has suspended export controls announced this month, but was conspicuously silent about rules imposed earlier, which are snarling global supply chains.

China’s far-reaching rules already affect manufacturers of semiconductors, cars and many other products. They will soon become much broader.

Concern is increasing throughout Southeast Asia as U.S. officials, intent on slowing China, have yet to say how they will define the origin country of imports.