Bloomberg The Turkish central bank’s thinly veiled pledge to take action to stem the lira’s bought only a short reprieve before the slump continued. By just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday in Istanbul, the lira was trading down 1.7 percent against the dollar — weaker than its level prior to the central bank’s statement about an hour earlier and …

  Dresden / DPA When his royal palace in Dresden was badly damaged by fire in 1701, the Elector of Saxony and King of Poland seized his chance: Out with the original romanesque architecture and in with a glamourous new-fangled style: baroque. Over the next three decades, August II (1670-1733) oversaw a major refurbishing of the Dresden Royal Palace, creating …

  Tokyo / DPA Otochika Ichikawa is a friendly, elderly man, who smiles and is good at making eye-contact as he speaks. The 70-year-old Japanese enjoys conversation. He knows, from bitter experience, how important social contact is. “When my daughter was 14 she refused to go to school,” Ichikawa says. His daughter spent hours leafing through the pages of all …