Economy

THE GAZA STRIP is a risky place for an invading army: its cities provide cover for Hamas fighters, who know the terrain; it is heavily populated, with civilians often in harm’s way; fighting in built-up areas is likely to be at close quarters and consequently bloody....

SINCE HAMAS’S terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th, and the outbreak of war in Gaza, there has been a sharp increase around the world in reports of antisemitic incidents. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an NGO based in New York City, says that in the two weeks...

GEORGE SANTOS burned bright and briefly. Shortly after his election to Congress in November 2022, the lies he told to win the seat began to be revealed. The Republican had claimed, falsely, that his grandparents had fled the Holocaust and that his mother was at the...

Hamas hopes to swap more for Israeli hostages Your browser does not support this video. Released Palestinian prisoners are greeted in the West Bank Image: Getty Images Over the past four days, as part of a truce, Israel has released 117 Palestinian prisoners in...

ON NOVEMBER 22ND Geert Wilders’s anti-immigrant Party for Freedom (PVV) finished first in the Dutch general election, winning 37 of the 150 seats in parliament, or 23.6% of the vote. His victory was a huge surprise. But the beneficiary of this sudden turn to the hard...

Abraham accordsBilateral agreements on Arab-Israeli normalisation signed in 2020. The first round of deals were between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020. Sudan normalised relations with Israel the following month and Morocco in...

THE LAWS of war give special protection to hospitals. They lose that protection if they are used for “harmful” acts. Israel has long claimed that al-Shifa hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, serves as a key command centre for Hamas, the group which killed or took...

AMERICA SAYS THAT its troops in Syria and Iraq have been attacked at least 55 times since Hamas’s assault on Israel on October 7th. Blaming Iran and its proxies across the Middle East, it has been hitting back: on November 12th America launched its third set of air...

AS THE FIGHTING in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas intensifies, so do the calls for a “ceasefire”—or a “humanitarian pause”. An emergency joint summit of the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Saudi Arabia on November 11th, for...

FOR EVERY ten incoming rockets, Israel’s system of defensive mobile batteries, the Iron Dome, typically shoots down nine. Israel claims to have maintained that ratio even as Hamas has fired bigger salvoes from Gaza in the aftermath of the Islamist group’s attack on...

MANY GOVERNMENTS and citizens are appalled by the civilian casualties from Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which is its response to Hamas’s attack on Israel. On October 10th the Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, described Israel’s actions as...

AMERICA’S STATE DEPARTMENT has been working overtime since war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has travelled twice to the Middle East to emphasise President Joe Biden’s support for Israel and urge the country to...

MODERN ECONOMIC statistics are best thought of as a work in progress. As new information becomes available to national statistics offices they update and revise previously published numbers. The picture of the economy comes into focus only slowly, more like an...

EVEN BEFORE Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza, attacked Israel on October 7th, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi was in a difficult position. In January 2023, when he became chief of general staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the most senior position in...

More than two thirds of the enclave’s population are registered refugees Your browser does not support this video. Video: Getty Images On November 1st the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) struck Jabalia, a refugee camp in northern Gaza, for the second time in two days....

IN 2015 IRISH GDP grew by an astounding 24.5%. It shot up by another 15% in 2021, when the average growth rate in the euro area was just 5.9%. Alas, no Celtic brew had supercharged the productivity of Irish workers. Those staggering increases were the result of...

Joe Biden doubts figures issued by Gazan officials. International agencies say they are mostly accurate Your browser does not support this video. Israel has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians in its bombardment of the Gaza Strip in recent weeks, according to the...

ON OCTOBER 24th António Guterres (pictured), secretary-general of the UN, called for an end to the “epic suffering” caused by Israel’s blockade and bombing of the Gaza strip. Hundreds of people had died in the preceding 24 hours, and on Tuesday only eight aid lorries...

SINCE THE bloody attack on Israel on October 7th, roughly 90% of airlines flying to Israel, including British Airways and Emirates, have suspended flights to the country. Hamas, the militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, has repeatedly fired rockets at Ben-Gurion...

The damage points to a malfunctioning rocket, not an air strike Your browser does not support this video. Footage appears to show the moment of the blast At around 7pm on October 17th, a blast struck the Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza city. The hospital is run by the...

ON THE EVENING of October 17th a blast struck al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City. Thousands of civilians had been sheltering there, alongside the sick. Palestinian officials say that hundreds died. Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza, and several Arab countries blamed...

ISRAEL IS AMASSING troops at its border with the Gaza Strip ahead of an expected ground invasion. At the same time it is evacuating villages near its border with Lebanon for fear that a second front could open in the north. Hizbullah, an Iran-backed Shia militant...

On October 17th officials from at least 90 countries are expected to arrive in Beijing for a two-day diplomatic festival. The occasion is a summit organised by Xi Jinping, China’s president, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), his...

ON OCTOBER 7TH Hamas, the militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, attacked Israel, killing 1,300 people and taking dozens of hostages. Israel has responded with force: strikes on Gaza had killed around 1,400 Palestinians by October 12th. Residents of the strip, a...

ON OCTOBER 9TH Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, and Donald Tusk, a former prime minister and the leader of the main opposition party, faced each other in a televised debate, six days before national elections. Four other candidates were on stage, but the...

IN THE EARLY hours of October 7th Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist organisation that runs Gaza, launched more than 2,000 rockets towards Israel. Over a thousand Hamas fighters, some in motorised gliders, crossed the border between Israel and Gaza. They attacked...

AMERICA’S HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES has been without a permanent speaker since October 3rd, when a handful of Republican rebels ousted Kevin McCarthy. Days later an attack thousands of miles from Washington, DC, highlighted the urgency of the problem: on October 7th...

In a matter of days, France has turned concern about a rise in cases of bedbugs into a matter of national hysteria. “They are everywhere: in mattresses, in cinemas, trains, metros and even hospitals,” declared Le Parisien, a popular daily newspaper, in a cover story....

LAST WINTER, having struggled to achieve progress on the battlefield, Russia sought to destroy the will of Ukraine’s people by intensifying missile attacks on civilian, as well as military, targets. The effort to break the population’s spirit failed, but strikes on...

ON SEPTEMBER 26TH American lawmakers returned to Washington, DC, with yet another government shutdown looming. The federal fiscal year begins on October 1st, but Congress has yet to appropriate the funding needed to keep the government running. The Senate has approved...

THE FARM BILL may not sound like a piece of legislation most Americans should care about. The enormous spending package, which is due for reauthorisation on September 30th, includes funding for eradicating feral swine and marketing sheep. Yet by transforming the...

POLAND HAS been among the staunchest supporters of Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022. But on September 20th its prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said that his country was no longer supplying weapons to its neighbour, and would focus on rearming...

DONALD TRUMP’S campaign for re-election is dogged with legal woes. The former president faces the prospect of four criminal trials on felony charges, which will overlap with the Republican primary season and the general-election campaign. But another type of legal...

WHEN INDIA gained independence from Britain in 1947, few outside the country believed that a union of such diverse states could hold together. India has survived—but not without threats to its unity. One of the most enduring has been the Khalistan movement, which...

WHEN INDIA gained independence from Britain in 1947, few outside the country believed that a union of such diverse states could hold together. India has survived—but not without threats to its unity. One of the most enduring has been the Khalistan movement, which...

EASTERN EUROPEAN countries have been among the staunchest supporters of Ukraine since Russia invaded last year. But that solidarity has frayed over the issue of agricultural exports. European Union member states that border Ukraine have argued that the duty-free...

EASTERN EUROPEAN countries have been among the staunchest supporters of Ukraine since Russia invaded last year. But that solidarity has frayed over the issue of agricultural exports. European Union member states that border Ukraine have argued that the duty-free...

EVER SINCE the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014 it has implemented policies to mould India according to its Hindu-nationalist vision. Now it may be poised to implement the most eye-catching change yet: renaming the country. During the G20 summit in...

MEXICANS ARE used to their country being used as a piñata during American election seasons. In 2015, in a speech to launch his presidential campaign, Donald Trump accused Mexico of sending drug-traffickers, rapists and other criminals to America and promised to make...

A LITTLE BIT more than 124 light years from Earth, circling an otherwise uninteresting star in the constellation of Leo, sits a planet called K2-18 b. It is one of thousands of exoplanets spotted by Kepler, a space telescope that was launched in 2009 and is designed...

A SURGE in holidaymakers at certain locations in recent years has added a word to the English language: overtourism. The idea that beauty spots are being overrun arose well before the pandemic, but the relaxation of covid-19 restrictions made matters worse, and...

A SURGE in holidaymakers at certain locations in recent years has added a word to the English language: overtourism. The idea that beauty spots are being overrun arose well before the pandemic, but the relaxation of covid-19 restrictions made matters worse, and...

DANIEL KHALIFE, a suspected terrorist, enjoyed about 75 hours of freedom after escaping from HMP Wandsworth, in south-west London, on September 6th. Three days later a police officer pulled him from a bike in north-west London. On September 11th he was charged with...

CHATGPT, AN ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE (AI) chatbot produced by OpenAI, a California-based startup, can generate human-like answers to questions. It can write poems, computer code and much more besides. UBS, a bank, reckons that since ChatGPT’s launch in November it has...

IN JANUARY PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to inveigh against “big-tech abuses” and suggest, among other things, an overhaul of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Mr Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was no...

And why they are so controversial, especially in Europe

IN A MODERN warzone anyone with a smartphone is a potential source of military intelligence. Since the early days of the Russian invasion, Ukraine has been crowdsourcing information from civilians. The idea is not new. During the second world war British volunteers...

Roald Dahl delighted in making readers squirm. His books for children, most of them written between 1961 and 1990, are mischievous, often with an edge of cruelty. Yet this month the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, revealed that hundreds of words and phrases had...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine warDURING THE second world war Germany’s armed forces destroyed Soviet tanks at a phenomenal rate. But although the Red Army lost 80,000 tanks, the Soviet Union’s industrial might allowed it to finish the war with more...

SOME PEOPLE covet passports and try to acquire new ones through naturalisation. Most are content with the citizenship they acquire at birth—at least that is guaranteed. Or so they think. In mid-February Nicaragua revoked the citizenship of more than 300 opposition...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS are everywhere. In newspapers, on social media or by the water cooler, the gossip about injections that can help to...

THE OPEN OCEAN, which covers nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, sustains and regulates life on the planet. Each year it sucks in about a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by humanity. It is economically valuable, too. The food, shipping, tourism and...

LAST SEPTEMBER, when explosions damaged Nord Stream 1 and 2, two undersea gas pipelines that connected Russia to Germany, evidence of a culprit was scant. Some European governments suspected Russia. President Vladimir Putin had been threatening to cut off energy...

IN RECENT WEEKS, intelligence has dominated the headlines. On February 26th American press reports described new intelligence suggesting that the covid-19 virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. On March 1st American intelligence agencies published a report...

ON MARCH 13TH Joe Biden, America’s president, accompanied by Anthony Albanese and Rishi Sunak, the prime ministers of Australia and Britain respectively, gathered in front of the USS Missouri, a Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine in San Diego, California....

ARGENTINA HAS always been a country of immigrants. In the 19th century millions of Italians and Spaniards came to plough the country’s fields. More recently hundreds of thousands of Bolivians, Paraguayans and Venezuelans have arrived. But the latest wave is different....

THE SUN had barely risen over the Black Sea on March 14th when two Russian Su-27 “Flanker” jets began following the American MQ-9 drone, more commonly known as the Reaper, 50 nautical miles south-west of Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russia since 2014. The...

RUSSIA TREATS Belarus, a nominally sovereign, independent country, as a satellite—in effect an extension of its own territory. It subsidises Belarus’s struggling economy, feeds it cheap energy and keeps the country’s veteran dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, in power,...

IN 2022 MIGRANTS sent home nearly $800bn, according to data from the World Bank. Around 80% of these remittances were sent to low- and middle-income countries. India received $100bn; Mexico got $60bn. Remittances were the biggest source of capital inflow for low- and...

THE HASTE at which the purchase of Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, by UBS, its great rival, was arranged left investors scrambling to understand the deal. One consequence is causing particular pain. The decision to write down around SFr16bn ($17bn) in Additional-Tier 1...

TikTok’s billion-plus users long to be famous for 15 seconds. But the social-media app’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, avoids the limelight. Few of TikTok’s users would recognise the 40-year-old Singaporean, whose personal TikTok account, @shou.time, shows only 13...

IN THE THREE years since the covid-19 pandemic began, one of the most persistent questions has been how the virus that caused it—SARS-CoV2—first jumped from animals to humans. SARS-CoV2 is one of a group of viruses, known as coronaviruses, commonly found in bats. But...

DRONES HAVE become a ubiquitous part of the war in Ukraine. Both sides use consumer quadcopters to track the enemy and drop grenades. Russia has used Iranian Shahed-136 drones to torment Ukrainian cities. In February Russia detected Ukranian drones deep in its...

WHAT’S THE TIME in Lebanon? Until March 29th the answer will largely depend on your religion. On March 26th the country would normally have set its clocks forward to daylight saving time (DST), as is the custom on the final Sunday of March. But at the last minute the...

TAIWANESE PRODUCTS power everything from iPhones and fridges to guided missiles. The island makes more than 60% of the world’s semiconductors. It also plays a crucial role in the great-power contest between China and America. Yet for such an important place few...

Editor’s note: On March 30th several news outlets reported that a grand jury in Manhattan had indicted Donald Trump.ALVIN BRAGG, Manhattan’s district attorney (DA), is no stranger to threats. Growing up in Harlem in the 1980s, he had a gun pointed at him six times,...

IN NORMAL TIMES people do not give it a second thought: they put their money in a bank and trust that it is safe. But every once in a while, a crisis shakes that faith. The collapse of three mid-sized banks in America over the past month has been one such moment....

INFLATION HAS DOGGED societies for centuries. Attempts to measure it properly began in earnest in the 20th century. In 1914 the British government calculated a “working-class cost of living index” to help guide adjustments to the wages of essential workers during the...

“THE JUDGE ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME.” When Donald Trump found out who would be presiding over his arraignment he took to Truth Social, the social-media platform he founded, to rant. On March 30th the...

ON APRIL 2ND, at the behest of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, Israel’s cabinet approved the creation of a national guard under the control of the national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Mr Ben-Gvir, the leader of Jewish Power, a far-right party that...

ERADICATING POVERTY in all its forms is the first of the UN’s 17 development goals. It is also a priority for many countries. To succeed, multilateral organisations and national governments need good policy—and a way to track their progress. So how should they define...

EVERY FEW years the French get worked up about an item of religious clothing that they deem inappropriate in the classroom. This time a controversy has broken out at la rentrée, the start of the new school year, over a government decision to ban from state schools the...

RUSSIA’S FAILED attempt in January and February to capture Vuhledar, a town in eastern Ukraine, has been described by some observers as a tank battle. That is not quite accurate. Videos of the offensive indicate that it was more a matter of Russian tanks against...

RUSSIA IS LED by an alleged war criminal. In March the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin as well as Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s so-called commissioner of children’s rights. The court says that the pair bear...

EASTERN EUROPEAN states have been among the staunchest supporters of Ukraine since Russia invaded last year. But efforts to help their neighbour continue to sell agricultural products have caused havoc in their own markets. Farmers have protested for weeks against...

ON APRIL 15th Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, and much of the rest of the country were engulfed by open warfare. For months tensions had been building between the two most powerful figures in the military government: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s de facto leader since a...

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, America’s Supreme Court wrote in 1937, is “the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom”. Very few types of speech fall outside that sanctuary. Only language that is obscene, false or misleading in a commercial...

RUNNING FOR the American presidency is a full-time job. “There was essentially no day or night” from the first presidential debate in September 1976 to election day, griped James Fallows, now a journalist, who worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign. Donald Trump, if he...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.WINNIE-THE-POOH is a good-natured, credulous bear. That makes him an unlikely protagonist for a slasher movie. “Winnie the Pooh:...

JOE BIDEN is being coy. On April 10th, at the White House Easter Egg Roll, the president told an interviewer that he planned to host “at least three or four more” of the annual events. Pressed, he said he intended to run for a second term as president. A few days...

INDIA’S POPULATION is poised to surpass China’s. No one knows exactly when: India’s government postponed the census due in 2021 (because of the covid-19 pandemic, it says), so its numbers are not as exact as they might have been. But, according to the United Nations,...

WHEN THE Supreme Court ruled last year that America’s constitution does not guarantee the right to abortion, it returned the matter to lawmakers. In the months since activists have pushed for a national prohibition. This Congress, which is divided on the issue, will...

THE WORLD’S biggest amusement park was not built in a day. In 1958 planning began for an “eastern Disneyland” to complement the park in Los Angeles; Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, opened its doors more than a decade later, in 1971. In the intervening years...

BETWEEN APRIL 19th and 24th Tunisia’s coastguard recovered 70 bodies from the Mediterranean sea. Less than a week earlier, 25 migrants died in the country’s waters. After a period of decline between 2016 and 2019, the number of people travelling from north African...

In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, investors and politicians got used to the idea of quantitative easing (QE), a new twist on monetary policy. QE was adopted because cuts in interest rates to their floor near zero were insufficient to counter the...

AMERICA’S WEALTHIEST 0.01% may have gained a new member on May 5th, when someone earned $279m. The source of the windfall was neither a bank nor a hedge fund, but rather the agency that regulates them. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it had dished...

Editor’s note: On June 23rd Mr Prigozhin launched an open revolt against the Kremlin, accusing the Russian army of killing Wagner troops. His mercenaries seized Rostov-on-Don, a southern city.A PILE OF corpses is quite a backdrop for a monologue. On May 4th Yevgeny...

EVER SINCE Recep Tayyip Erdogan won power in Turkey 20 years ago he has been in little danger of losing it. Mr Erdogan and his Justice and Development (AK) party have won every presidential and parliamentary election, usually by comfortable margins. During that period...

HOW DO YOU stop an attack drone from delivering its payload? Loitering munitions, which are single-use bomber drones, have been deployed to lethal effect by both Russia and Ukraine throughout the war. They are cheap and nimble. As well as military-grade models, both...

ALEXANDER LUKASHENKO, the dictator of Belarus, spends much of his time inspecting factories, scrutinising harvests and presiding over ice-hockey matches. For nearly a week in May he did none of those things—or anything else in public, fuelling intense speculation...

IN THE LATE afternoon of May 22nd footage emerged of two grinning pro-Ukrainian fighters in the midst of a cross-border raid into Russia. “The key to the border has been broken in half,” says one, quoting from “Everything is Going to Plan”, a cult anthem by Civil...

AMERICA HAS a dizzying number of banks. In recent weeks, that has proved to be a source of confusion. After Signature Bank, based in New York City, was seized by regulators on March 12th, four other banks with the same name had to clarify that they had no link with...

AT THEIR SUMMIT in Hiroshima on May 20th, the leaders of the G7 group of rich democracies talked about “de-risking” their economic ties with China, but not decoupling from it. The same phrase appeared in an important speech by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the...

ON THE MORNING of May 31st the citizens of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, had a rude awakening. Just after half past six the sound of sirens filled the air. Phones buzzed on nightstands, urging residents to seek shelter. Confusion ensued: Seoulites did not know what...

IN “1984”, GEORGE ORWELL’S dystopian novel, the ruling party controls the past by feeding reports of inconvenient historical events into a “memory hole”, replacing them with its preferred version. China’s Communist Party has long taken that approach—no more so than...

ON MAY 29TH, when a Serb mob attacked NATO troops guarding a town hall in Zvecan in northern Kosovo, alarms sounded in the chancelleries of Europe and in Washington. At least 80 people were hurt, including 30 NATO peacekeepers. By the next day the mob had vanished....

THE BLOWING up of Nova Kakhovka dam in occupied southern Ukraine in the early morning of June 6th has had devastating consequences downstream. On June 7th the Ukrainian government said that 42,000 people were at risk from flooding: thousands have been evacuated....

UKRAINIAN FORCES have often attributed the poor performance of Russian soldiers since the invasion last year to drunkenness. Armies reflect their societies and alcoholism caused by excessive vodka consumption has long been a reason for the chronically low life...

THE TACTICS of Valery Zaluzhny, the overall commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, will be studied by military historians. But the fate of the country rests upon the shoulders of other men further down the chain of command, too—among them Colonel-General Oleksandr...

“ACROSS THE finish line is a more unified, more reconciled Australia,” declared Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in August as he set the date for a referendum on an indigenous “Voice to Parliament”. On October 14th 17.6m Australians will be asked to vote...

America’s stock regulator is about to test its view of the asset class in court

WHAT ARE YOUR pronouns? In English, the most common answers are “he” or “she”. But a growing number of people identify as neither male nor female, and ask to be referred to with novel pronouns. “They” is by far the most common of these. In English, the linguistic...

ON JUNE 15TH the privileges committee of Britain’s House of Commons issued a long-awaited report on Boris Johnson, concluding that the former prime minister deliberately misled Parliament when he described illegal gatherings held at 10 Downing Street, his official...

IT TAKES ABOUT two hours to dive to the resting place of the Titanic, almost 4km beneath the surface of the north Atlantic. At around 9am GMT on the morning of June 18th the Titan submersible, a five-man craft built and operated by OceanGate, an American company,...

DURING A EUROPEAN building boom that began in the 1960s, a novel form of construction material began to be used. Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, known as RAAC, is pre-cast in a factory, typically into planks, before being taken to a construction site where it...

LOOK UP AT a flagpole in most big American cities in June, and you will probably see three banners: the stars and stripes, the state or city emblem and a rainbow flag, which is flown to mark LGBTQ Pride month. But if you attend a Pride parade in one of those cities,...

IT ALLOWS COMPANIES to “inject an ideological agenda through our economy”, says Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. It “empowers an unelected cabal of bureaucrats…to rate companies based on their adherence to left-wing values,” says Mike Pence, a former vice-president....

ON JUNE 12TH large parts of Reddit, a social-media platform with nearly 56m active daily users, went dark. The site is made up of forums, known as subreddits. Moderators—users who run these forums on a voluntary basis—removed 8,000 of the most popular from public view...

ELIZABETH GILBERT, an American author, is more used to soul-searching than grappling with geopolitical problems. Her best-known work, “Eat, Pray, Love”, is a memoir about life after divorce. But in recent weeks she has been ruminating on a grislier subject: Russia’s...

WHEN WAGNER GROUP mercenaries, commanded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, advanced towards Moscow on June 24th, they met little resistance on the ground. But the rebels did come under attack from the Russian air force—and shot down a surprising number of their attackers. At...

MEETINGS BETWEEN Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin are often awkward. In September, when the Belarusian dictator ranted about men “running away” from mobilisation in Russia, his counterpart squirmed in his seat. That reflects their uncomfortable relationship. Mr...

FOR MORE than a year the West’s effort to help Ukraine has run between two tracks: deny Russia a victory but avoid a direct war between it and NATO. Ukraine wants more, and applied to join the NATO alliance in September 2022. It will be denied for now. Instead, as...

AMERICA’S RELATIONSHIP with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is rocky. The agency seems innocuous: it preserves heritage sites, sponsors literacy projects and promotes education on topics from science to genocide. Yet...

ON JUNE 22ND the Admiral Essen, a Russian warship, was spotted in Sevastopol, a Crimean port on the Black Sea, sporting a striking new paint job. Its bow and stern were black and the midsection white, ensuring that, from a distance, the ship looked smaller than it...

For the first time in seven years, the weather pattern is back

ON JULY 5TH Cheng Wing-chun, a 27-year-old Hong Konger, became the first person in the territory to be convicted of insulting China’s national anthem. Mr Cheng posted a 94-second video to YouTube of a local athlete receiving a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021,...

THE FLURRY of images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) feels like the product of a thoroughly modern tool. In fact, computers have been at the easel for decades. In the early 1970s Harold Cohen, an artist, taught one to draw using an early AI system. “AARON”...

MEMBERS OF THE North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would like to announce some good news at their annual summit. The military alliance will gather in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, on July 11th for a two-day meeting. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has...

KATE MOSS, a British model, once quipped that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. Drinkers of Diet Coke, the sugar-free version of the stuff in red cans, and of which Ms Moss is the current face, may agree. Why else would they drink it, when everyone knows (or...

THE NAVSTAR GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM, commonly known as GPS, is familiar to many smartphone users as the technology behind the blue location dot on map apps. But GPS, which is operated by the American space force, was designed for the military. Since its launch in...

ON JULY 5TH the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and Gavi, an organisation promoting vaccination, announced that 12 African countries would receive 18m doses of the world’s first malaria vaccine. Mosquirix, developed by GSK, a British pharma firm, will be deployed...

BETWEEN JULY 10th and July 16th, more than 100m Americans were warned by their government of “potentially deadly” temperatures. Swathes of Asia and Europe are broiling. China’s temperature record was shattered; people sought relief from the heat in bomb shelters....

ON JULY 9TH Walking Borders, an aid group, reported that 300 migrants travelling on a flotilla of boats from Senegal towards the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago, had disappeared. That number was a well-informed guess. Unless the migrants are rescued or their...

AFTER THREE nights of Russian attacks, Ukraine’s ports are counting the cost. The latest bombing, which targeted the Black Sea hub of Odessa and nearby Mykolaiv early on July 20th, left at least two dead and more than 20 injured. Some 60,000 tonnes of grain have been...

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine warFIRST IT WAS tanks. Then it was fighter jets. Then cluster bombs. Since Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine has secured a range of hardware that Western allies were at first reluctant to give. Two items that...

THE SWORN enemies of Europe’s central bankers include Vladimir Putin, covid-19 and, apparently, Beyoncé. All three have recently been blamed for hot inflation, but the American singer seems an unlikely macroeconomic force. Hotel prices surged in Sweden when 46,000...

FEW THINGS frighten governments as much as hungry voters. In India, after heavy rains in early July wiped out paddy fields, officials acted to pre-empt an unpalatable increase in rice prices. On July 20th the government banned the export of non-basmati white rice to...

AT THEIR ANNUAL gathering in Jackson Hole last week the world’s central bankers talked, among other things, about the threat of deglobalisation. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), noted that the governments of Western countries are...

ASK A CLIMATE scientist about possible “tipping points” and you are likely to hear about AMOC. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is a stream of water which, as it flows from the southern to the northern (hence “meridional”) part of the Atlantic, grows...

SOLID-STATE PHYSICS very rarely goes viral. But that is what happened when a group of researchers at Korea University, in Seoul, announced on July 22nd that they had discovered a “room-temperature superconductor”, a material dubbed LK-99. They published a pair of...

A YEAR AFTER they were invented, both sides in Ukraine are already fielding thousands of racing drones with improvised warheads. Ukraine’s defence ministry calls them kamikazes, because the warhead destroys the drone itself. They are also known as First Person View...

CULHAM, A VILLAGE near Oxford, in England, is home to just 500 people. It is, though, next door to the nearest thing on Earth to a “Silicon Valley” of nuclear fusion. What is happening there epitomises the shift of the search for controlled fusion power from...

FOOD SHOPPING has become a dangerous pursuit. Nutritional horrors lurk on every shelf. Ready-meals are packed with salt and preservatives, breakfast cereals are sweeter than chocolate bars, and processed meats are packed with nitrite-preservatives, which can form...

NORTH KOREA’S enemies have a busy August planned. First the leaders of America, Japan and South Korea will gather at Camp David in Maryland on August 18th to discuss, among other things, the North’s aggression. Days later the Americans and South Koreans will kick off...

ON AUGUST 22ND the 15th annual summit of the BRICS—a group comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—takes place in Johannesburg. For the first time one of the bloc’s leaders will be absent. As host, South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, felt he...

ON AUGUST 9TH a plume of smoke rose over the Zagorsk manufacturing plant, north of Moscow, which supplies optical equipment to Russia’s armed forces. An explosion there killed one person, wounded 60, and left eight unaccounted for, according to officials, who...

THE MAFIA, a sex cult and several titans of Wall Street have all been brought down by America’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act, a legal tool designed to tackle organised crime. Now a version of it could be used to nail a former president...

FOR A MAN who faces multiple charges of terrorism and inciting violence across Pakistan, the case that eventually landed Imran Khan in jail was tame. On August 5th a court in Islamabad, the capital, convicted the ex-prime minister (and former cricket star) of “corrupt...

IN THE EARLY 2010s reports emerged of a nightmarish drug appearing in Russia and eastern Europe. Krokodil, a cheap substitute for heroin that was concocted in kitchen laboratories, left users with scaly skin and rotting wounds. Now a similarly damaging drug, a...

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN has conceded that the name was a mistake: the success of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), his flagship legislation, should not be measured by its effect on inflation. These days the IRA is most often associated with decarbonisation—that is, by...

IT IS OFTEN said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Researchers hope that they might also be a window to the brain. Scientists wonder if eye scans could provide information about a wide range of conditions, including ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, autism,...

IN 1872 ULYSSES GRANT was reportedly arrested for speeding. One day, as the 18th American president charged along 13th Street in Washington, DC, a policeman waved down his horse-drawn carriage. In the arresting officer’s own telling, Grant made a vain attempt to plead...

MOST PEOPLE think of Facebook as a social network and Google as a search engine. But tech geeks see these services as “platforms”: vast online territories that users inhabit. The companies that run them have mostly been free to make the rules in these digital places....