Lukoil is a Russian energy company that owns the Lukoil Neftochim oil refinery in Bulgaria. In October 2025, the US and UK sanctioned major Russian energy firms, including Lukoil.

Lukoil Neftochim is one of the largest oil refineries in the Balkans. Bulgaria currently has a sanctions waiver that allows the Lukoil Neftochim refinery to continue operations.

In rural areas in China, land is owned by the “collective” (the village). Rural households have a right to use a piece of land to build their homes, but may not sell their property to people elsewhere.

Taiwan runs a large trade surplus, about $15 billion overall and $70 billion with the United States. Its central bank, the CBC, has typically curbed appreciation of the Taiwanese dollar by accumulating foreign reserves, but amid the U.S. dollar's depreciation in early 2025, it allowed the Taiwanese dollar to rise instead of intervening.

The “banality of evil” is the concept, coined by Hannah Arendt, that great evil is often committed by ordinary, thoughtless individuals who fail to reflect on the moral consequences of their actions, and not just by people motivated by deep hatred or ideology. 

A digital mind is a theoretical technology consisting of a computer-simulated brain that responds to information in the same way as an ordinary brain and possesses a sentient, conscious mind. Human-level digital minds are digital persons: computer-simulated people who are fully conscious and react to virtual events (such as virtual hunger or virtual weather) in the same way that people react to real events.

The “doing/allowing distinction” is a moral principle according to which actively causing harm is morally worse than allowing the same harm to occur, even if the outcomes are equally bad (for example, killing someone vs. letting someone die). In practice, it implies that it is wrong to harm one person even to prevent a somewhat greater harm to another.

Mikasa and Eren were childhood friends who fell deeply in love when they were eleven. Their relationship defined much of Mikasa’s life and sense of purpose. When they were nineteen, Eren died tragically.