Our daily trip around the world

🌎 UNESCO designated 42 new areas as World Heritage sites. The UN-backed organization, which is tasked with identifying areas of “outstanding universal value,” voted to add 33 new cultural sites and nine new natural sites from Europe, Africa, South America, and the US to its World Heritage list. These include Ohio’s first-ever World Heritage site (Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks), a series of Viking-age ring fortresses in Denmark, and a Silk Road corridor through Central Asia.

🇨🇳🏗️ Chinese authorities placed the chair of embattled real-estate firm Evergrande under police control. Chairman Hui Ka Yan, who founded Evergrande in 1996, was detained by police earlier this month for undisclosed reasons, per a Bloomberg report published yesterday. Evergrande was once China’s top-selling real estate developer in the mid-to-late 2010s, but, in 2020, a regulatory crackdown on China’s real estate industry forced Evergrande to disclose that it had over $300 billion in liabilities and lacked enough funds to pay off its debt, causing the company to lose 90+% of its market cap over the past three years.

🇮🇱🇺🇸 The US agreed to let Israeli citizens enter America without a visa. After signing a preliminary deal in July, the US government officially accepted Israel into its visa waiver program yesterday, which means Israeli citizens will be allowed to visit America for up to 90 days without a visa beginning November 30. As a part of reciprocal actions, Israel will allow US citizens to fly to Tel Aviv and travel to Palestine over land, instead of going through Jordan first.