THE CIRCLE

THE CIRCLE (China )   Panicked shoppers thronged supermarket aisles,  grabbing  bags of salt by the armful. They  queued  six deep outside wholesalers. Most went home with only one or two bags; the lucky ones managed to snag a five-year supply before stocks ran out. This was China in the days after Japan's  Fukushima  nuclear disaster, when people in cities up and down the country's highly populated east coast  bought  huge quantities of iodized salt in the misguided belief it would protect them from radiation. The 2011 disaster — the worst nuclear accident in 25 years — threw a major wrench into  China's ambitious nuclear plans . It sent authorities scrambling to reassure people that they were not at risk of a similar catastrophe and sparked an immediate moratorium on new power plants. That ban was lifted this year. Now, China is gradually ramping up construction again. With around a dozen nuclear power plants  in th...

THE CIRCLE ( London )   Boris Johnson has been backed into a corner over Brexit . Partly through his own missteps, partly from the growing opposition to his "do-or-die" Brexit plan, Johnson is a man for whom the losses are piling up, while the UK is a country running out of time. All of the remaining Brexit options facing Johnson -- and to a larger extent the UK  -- lead to one place: An early election. The only real question is whether it happens before or after Brexit . Whenever it happens, the next election will be vicious, nasty and personal. "For many Conservatives, (opposition leader) Jeremy Corbyn embodies the very politics that they most loathe, while in Corbyn's Labour Party, Boris embodies the out-of-touch privileged elite," explains Matthew Goodwin, Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. "When there's so much to play for, it's impossible to see how it can't get very personal." Here's where things ...

THE CIRCLE ( Washington, United States of America ) American corporations often focus on quarterly earnings or short-term stock movements, but the real goal for long-term value creation is to build a business that can be a reliable source of growth for all stakeholders — customers, employees, communities and investors. The evidence — supported by icons of American capitalism including Warren Buffett, whose company  Berkshire Hathaway  has never offered earnings guidance and is up more than 1,000,000% on a book-value basis since 1964 — suggests that a long-term focus pays off. Long-term companies tend to outperform short-term companies, and long-term investors tend to outperform their short-term peers. A 2017 McKinsey & Co. study  estimates that had all U.S. publicly listed firms operated like their long-term counterparts, the U.S. economy would have added more than 5 million additional jobs and generated an additional $1 trillion in GDP from 2001 to 2015...

THE CIRCLE  ( Tehran, Iran ) :  Iran's foreign minister has raised the specter of "all-out war" in the event of US or Saudi military strikes and that Saudi Arabia would have to fight "to the last American soldier." Javad Zarif told MEDIA that Iran hoped to avoid conflict, adding that the country was willing to talk to its regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But the possibility of a return to negotiations with the US, however, would not happen unless Washington provided full sanctions relief as promised under the 2015 nuclear deal, Tehran's top diplomat said. He again denied Tehran's involvement in weekend attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, which dramatically ratcheted up tensions in the region this week. Zarif said Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, who claimed responsibility for the attack, have stepped up their military capabilities and are capable of conducting a sophisticated operation such as t...