Category: economy

“My cousin and I were driving in the car one day and my mouth started moving before my brain knew what it was saying,” says Angus Barge, a 30-year-old who … Read More

THE ANNUAL UN climate talks are often compared to a circus or a battleground. This year’s summit, held at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, was particularly shambolic and grumpy. … Read More

It was not the sort of pre-tournament publicity that the organisers would have hoped for. On November 20th Qatar’s footballers will take on Ecuador in the first match of the … Read More

Something about global population trends seems to send otherwise sensible people over the edge. According to the United Nations, the planet’s population is due to reach 8bn on November 15th. … Read More

THE FIELD NEXT to Grigoriy Tkachenko’s fish pond is littered with spent 220mm rockets. His carp are dead: the Russian soldiers who occupied his farm in March and April fished … Read More

At first glance, Vladimir Putin has little in common with an Ethiopian foot-soldier. One man has palaces and nuclear weapons, the other a shack and an old Kalashnikov. Yet both … Read More

Earlier this year, Antônio Carlos Lombardi Peixoto went to his doctor complaining of fever and an endless cough. He thought it was something to do with his diabetes. Instead, he … Read More

Vladimir Putin is a keen reader of history. In long months of isolation during the covid-19 pandemic, say some, Russia’s president lingered in the Kremlin archives brooding over his country’s … Read More

On October 12th Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, gave an ominous warning. Energy infrastructure around the world was now “at risk”, he said. Mr Putin’s warning came a month after explosions … Read More

Coca is ubiquitous in remote rural parts of Colombia. Farmers plant the hardy, high-altitude bush, harvest its foliage and sell it in bulk to the small local laboratories that have … Read More

Throngs descended on the Jamsil Arena in Seoul, the South Korean capital, in July to see Super Junior, a band that exemplifies the “Korean Wave”. The crowd reflected the global … Read More

Sixty years ago the world was staring at a nuclear cataclysm. The Cuban missile crisis began in October 1962 when America detected Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. It blockaded the … Read More

On september 21st Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, announced the calling-up of perhaps 300,000 military reservists to fight in his sputtering war against Ukraine. The 18m followers of the rt (formerly … Read More

Despite its name, the Palace of Parliament in the centre of Bucharest, Romania’s capital, is no monument to democracy. It was conceived in the 1980s by Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s late … Read More

WHEN QUEEN ELIZABETH II inherited the throne in 1952, great swathes of the world map were bedecked in imperial red. Britain still ruled—or had a predominant influence over—some 50 dominions, … Read More

Over the course of her long reign Elizabeth II served as head of state of 32 countries, most of them colonies. At her death she remained so for just 15. … Read More

Nuhu amin is a medical researcher at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Bangladesh. Later this month one of his colleagues will dig into a pit latrine in … Read More

Before the pandemic a quarter of pupils in Capistrano Unified, a sprawling school district south of Los Angeles, were eligible to receive free lunch and breakfast. But when classrooms closed … Read More

In 2014 tunisia adopted a new constitution, three years after Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s dictator, was ousted in a revolt. It made Tunisia into a democracy that … Read More

Editor’s note: Please visit our revised Ukraine hub to read the best of our coverage of the war Six months in, Russia and Ukraine are fighting a looking-glass war. Much … Read More

“The city doesn’t exist any more,” said Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, in April. By then Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, had been under Russian siege for seven weeks—bombed, … Read More

On a recent warm and breezy Saturday night a few dozen Russians—mostly in their 20s and 30s—crammed into a small Soviet-era apartment in Vakke, a well-heeled part of Tbilisi, Georgia’s … Read More

“I am in a hurry,” says Conny Helder, a Dutch minister who juggles the portfolios of sport and care for the elderly. She is referring to the second half of … Read More

It was just the sort of start a host nation hopes for. On July 6th the opening game of the 2022 European Women’s Football Championship saw England beat Austria 1-0. … Read More

It is just one of thousands of similar stories. Juan Cuatrecasas’s son attended a school in Bilbao run by Opus Dei, a Catholic institution. Around age 12, he became afraid … Read More

King norvic tarroyo lives with his parents and five siblings in a slum near the sea wall in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The eight-year-old has not set foot … Read More

Laura buckingham could have died three times. Ms Buckingham, 37, has one son. She has also had 11 planned pregnancies that have gone wrong. In one case a miscarriage led … Read More

“Money no longer had any value in Istanbul,” laments the narrator of “My Name is Red”, a novel by Orhan Pamuk set in the 16th century. “[B]akeries that once sold … Read More

FIRST IT WAS rugby union. Now it is swimming. On June 19th the Fédération Internationale de Natation (FINA), swimming’s global governing body, ruled that transgender women—ie, biological males who consider … Read More

DURING the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, as China imposed strict controls on the movement of its citizens, technology became the main means of tackling anxiety and depression. … Read More

The war in Ukraine has exposed the vehicle’s vulnerabilities. They can be overcome Source link

Rose, a 40-year-old woman in Manila, long beaten up by her husband, finds her predicament markedly worsen as the covid-19 lockdown leaves him at home most of the time. A … Read More

When shadrack lolokuru was “nine or ten”, his relatives put him into a bucket and lowered him into a well. From the murky bottom, he filled the bucket and passed … Read More

When shadrack Lolokuru was “nine or ten”, his relatives put him into a bucket and lowered him into a well. From the murky bottom, he filled the bucket and passed … Read More

Never before have Western economic sanctions proliferated in such numbers. More have been slapped on entities connected to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine on February 24th than had been … Read More

Never before have Western economic sanctions proliferated in such numbers. More have been slapped on entities connected to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine on February 24th than had been … Read More

WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN was first elected president of Russia in 2000, he changed little in the office he inherited from Boris Yeltsin. Yet in place of a pen on the … Read More

WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN was first elected president of Russia in 2000, he changed little in the office he inherited from Boris Yeltsin. Yet in place of a pen on the … Read More

THE MEGAPHONE has been taken away. On January 8th Twitter, a social network, announced that it was “permanently suspending” President Donald Trump’s account. Viewed in isolation, the two tweets that … Read More

LIBERALS HAVE become lazy when thinking about the mob. They have celebrated “people power” when it threatens regimes they disapprove of, in the Middle East, say, while turning a blind … Read More

THE MOB that rampaged through the Capitol in Washington, DC, on January 6th would acknowledge little in common with the pro-democracy activists who invaded Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) in … Read More

WHATSAPP, WHICH 2bn people use to send some 100bn messages a day, is rarely in the news. When it is, the stories are mostly about whether, in order to increase … Read More

LAURENT FRAT is standing on top of a ridge line in the French alps, preparing to leap down to the valley below. If something goes wrong, he will die. “If … Read More

MYRANDA CHANCEY loves being pregnant. So much so, that after having three children of her own, the 26-year-old decided in 2019 to be pregnant for someone else: “I think everyone … Read More

AT FIRST GLANCE, a murder in Istanbul, an abduction in Dubai and a deportation from Austria may seem to be unrelated. But they are all part of a disturbing pattern … Read More

A COMMAND CENTRE to scan the digital realm for global disinformation campaigns. Standardised plugs for electric cars that will work both in America and in the European Union (EU) and … Read More

IN NORMAL TIMES it is notoriously difficult to get past the bouncers at Berghain, a techno nightclub in eastern Berlin. But in September the establishment flung its doors wide: anyone … Read More

DURING HIS final days Mohamed Monir, an Egyptian journalist, was so short of breath he could barely speak. In a video recorded in July last year, as his final hours … Read More

IT HAS BEEN 11 months since anyone hugged Larry. The 62-year-old accountant lives alone in Chicago, which went into lockdown last March in response to covid-19. He has heart problems … Read More

EMILY CLARK’S boys did not return to class in September, when schools in England opened to all pupils for the first time since the spring. Her three school-aged sons had … Read More

AT THE NUREMBERG trials, which began on November 20th 1945, allied forces prosecuted leading Nazis for atrocities committed during the Holocaust and the second world war. Among the charges against … Read More

GINA BISIGNANO cut an unusual figure among the rioters on January 6th. Not many chose to storm the Capitol dressed in Chanel boots, a Louis Vuitton sweater and fashionable sunglasses. … Read More

This article has been updated since its publication. WHEN THE first covid-19 vaccines began to be distributed in December, Jürgen Stock, the secretary-general of Interpol, the world’s policing body, called … Read More

ON THE MORNING of November 13th last year Zambia’s vice-president told parliament, “This country will not default.” Hours later the inevitable happened. Having destroyed its relationship with the IMF, struggled … Read More

“I DID NOT get pregnant by choice,” says Annunciata, a mother of eight in Mweso, eastern Congo. Her husband often raped her. “Husbands do that,” she says matter-of-factly. He hit … Read More

TO SHOW HOW her husband would hit her, Ana (not her real name) makes a fist with her slender fingers and swings. He began soon after their marriage when she … Read More

THE COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing good for the mood of Park Ha-young, an undergraduate at Seoul National University. She spent much of last year worrying about the disease, and … Read More

LOOK ONLY at the top of the photograph of four men posing in military garb and the mood seems light. One man smiles. Another puffs on a cigarette while staring … Read More

THE PEOPLE OF the dusty eastern Congolese town of Mubambiro put little faith in the protection promised by the UN’s blue helmets in their midst. Fabrice Zahiga, a government functionary … Read More

MANUEL SUFFERED two serious brain injuries as a child in Denver, Colorado. The first was the result of a fall. The second occurred when someone threw a rock at his … Read More

FLIGHT EK 787 touched down in Accra at 7.39am on February 24th. It was carrying 600,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine. The shots arrived in Ghana from the Serum Institute … Read More

THE 13TH hole at Augusta National, named Azalea after the riotous pink blooms behind the green, is one of golf’s most celebrated par-fives. Its fairway turns sharply left after 275 … Read More

GEORGINA IS IN no hurry to get back to the office. The 37-year-old, who works in financial services in Geneva, has been working from home for most of the past … Read More

CALL IT “Zoom face-envy”. Because of the rise of video-conferencing during the pandemic, legions now spend hours staring at their own faces and, inevitably, comparing them with those of others. … Read More

IN CENTRAL Lusaka a brand-new flyover flutters with the green, white and saffron of the Indian flag. Throughout the Zambian capital lorries produced by Tata Motors, part of the steel-to-tech … Read More

RACHEL GRIMES served three tours of Northern Ireland as an officer in the British army. Her colleagues in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the region’s erstwhile police force, noticed that things … Read More

WESTERN DEFENCE ministries are talking up their willingness to take on a new enemy: climate change. In March Lloyd Austin, America’s defence secretary, wrote that “the changing climate is altering … Read More

WHILE ASSORTED G20 “Sherpas”, officials who do the donkey work on summits, gathered in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia in March last year, lockdowns were starting and international travel was stopping. … Read More

NOBODY LIKES a call from the taxman. Donald Rumsfeld, who as America’s defence secretary oversaw a budget bigger than the economy of a typical country, nonetheless finds the rules so … Read More

IN MARCH, BENEATH the chandeliers of the Elysée palace, four adult cousins met Emmanuel Macron, France’s president. What really happened, they wanted to know, to their grandfather, Ali Boumendjel, a … Read More

“ON SOME DAYS everything gets totally out of hand,” sighs Katharina Boesche, a German self-employed lawyer and mother of three. Fourteen months of closures and semi-closures of her daughters’ schools … Read More

IN MARCH, President Joe Biden asked his spooks how the covid-19 pandemic had started. Contradicting claims made last year by Donald Trump, who said the intelligence services had shown him … Read More

IT IS POSSIBLE that the chain of infections which spread SARS-CoV-2 around the world began, as most new diseases do, when an animal virus found its way unaided into humans, … Read More

HOURS BEFORE Jo Phoenix, a professor of criminology at Britain’s Open University, was due to give a talk at Essex University about placing transgender women in women’s prisons, students threatened … Read More

A PILE OF fake corpses littered the heart of Bangkok. The bodies—white sacks stuffed with hay and spattered with red paint—symbolised Thai victims of covid-19. “They’re dead because of the … Read More

WHEN THE Turkish coastguard found them in the Aegean in the dead of night, they had been adrift for three hours. The air was hissing out of their rubber dinghy. … Read More

May 3rd 2022  |  Budapest, Hong Kong, Mumbai and St Petersburg Olga Rudenko has a litany of worries as editor of the Kyiv Independent, an online newspaper in Ukraine. Since … Read More

TOM MAPLES spent five days and almost $7,000 getting home to London from Tanzania in May. Many African countries are on the English “red list”, meaning anyone who has visited … Read More

“THE VIRUS MYSTERY”, broadcast on August 12th, drew uncommonly wide attention for a Danish television documentary. That was because it featured Peter Ben Embarek, an expert on food security and … Read More

Aug 22nd 2021 ONCE AMERICA announced that it would not save its client state, things unravelled quickly. As the enemy seized province after province, government soldiers shed their uniforms and … Read More

Aug 28th 2021 TOM EISENHAUER remembers driving through Manitoba, a province in central Canada, more than a decade ago. Surrounding his car were fields of cold-weather crops, such as wheat, … Read More

IN LATE JULY, less than a week after the British government lifted most of its remaining covid-19 restrictions, several thousand people nonetheless gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to protest against … Read More

Sep 4th 2021 FOR MUCH of this year, the global distribution of covid vaccines has been enormously inequitable. The rollout has been a two-speed affair, with richer countries in the … Read More

Sep 10th 2021 WILL ANYTHING ever be the same? In the days after 9/11, when all were stunned, it was clear the world had changed profoundly. Less obvious was just … Read More

Sep 11th 2021 BASRA AND TORORO “A WOMAN WHO drives a car will be killed,” says Sheikh Hazim Muhammad al-Manshad. He says it matter-of-factly, without raising his voice. The unwritten … Read More

THE JANICKI OMNI PROCESSOR, a $2m machine paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, turns human waste into water and electricity. In poor cities such as Dakar in … Read More

Sep 17th 2021 Only once in its history has America handed over a nuclear submarine propulsion plant, the crown jewels of military technology, to another country. That was 63 years … Read More

Sep 19th 2021 JUST OCCASIONALLY, you can see the tectonic plates of geopolitics shifting in front of your eyes. Suez in 1956, Nixon going to China in 1972 and the … Read More

Sep 22nd 2021 IN SEPTEMBER 2020 doctors and public-health officials in the northern hemisphere were on high alert. They did not know how covid-19 would behave in the first winter … Read More

Oct 1st 2021 Natasha Loder and Simon Akam jointly won a Feature of the Year prize from the Medical Journalists’ Association for their coverage in The Economist and 1843 of … Read More

HIS ARM and a leg wrapped in bandages, Artyom Uymanen stood outside a St Petersburg voyenkomat, or military recruitment centre, in 2019 to protest against Russia’s mandatory military draft. The … Read More

Oct 7th 2021 DELHI, NAIROBI AND NORWICH SIINA KARBIN, a Finn living in Vienna, had never imagined paying someone to tutor her children. But then in early 2020 Austria’s schools … Read More

Oct 8th 2021 THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE has not had the greatest few years. In 2019, to great fanfare, it was given to Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, … Read More

Oct 13th 2021 “A NEW GLOBAL energy economy is emerging.” Thus declared Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, a global forecaster, launching the organisation’s World Energy Outlook, its … Read More

Oct 16th 2021 DAKAR, DUBAI, ISTANBUL, NEW YORK AND SINGAPORE ON OCTOBER 8TH two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, won the Nobel peace prize for their “efforts to safeguard … Read More

Oct 16th 2021 THE DAY before Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize, the editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta stood in remembrance outside the Moscow apartment block where his newspaper’s most … Read More

Oct 23rd 2021 LAST-MINUTE APPEALS are common in the weeks preceding the COP, the UN’s annual climate summit. Green groups urge world leaders to promise bold action. Poor countries ask … Read More

MANY COUNTRIES did not require passports before the first world war. But as the conflict spread, states scrambled to introduce travel documents to help secure their borders. The result, after … Read More

COP26, THE UN climate summit that began in Glasgow on Sunday, has got off to an inauspicious start. The city itself is grappling with a strike by rubbish collectors, who … Read More

Nov 4th 2021 Kyiv and São Paulo Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Save time by … Read More