GOOGLE'S plans for a balloon-powered internet, the seasonal nature of cyber-attacks and America's Supreme Court ruling on patenting human genes Follow paywall rules...
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JUSTIN Yifu Lin was the chief economist of the World Bank from 2008 to 2012, the first appointee to that post from the developing world, and thus approaches issues with a fresh pair of eyes. So it is intriguing to see, in his new book Against the Consensus:...
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HE WAS a media darling before his inauguration in 2007, but President Rafael Correa’s adversarial relationship with the press has counted among the defining characteristics of his six-year rule. On June 14th a legislature now dominated by his allies...
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MEXICO'S wealthiest city, Monterrey, has been plagued by violent crime in recent years. But a new initiative between the government and local businesses is starting to clean up the streets Follow paywall rules...
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THE headline stories on one of the Polish papers on June 13th made typical reading. Four people killed when their car ploughed into a shop near Poznan; five dead after their car rolled off the tarmac and into a ditch along a rural road in the northwest.Nine...
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BAKING in the heat like his viewers on Pariser Platz, on the eastern side of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, Barack Obama began by taking off his own jacket and asking everybody else to do the same. But informality does not preclude soaring rhetoric. In...
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The Chinese yuan has gone from being controversially weak to uncomfortably strong Follow paywall rules...
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AFTER riding a tram in Strasbourg, Matt Yglesias, a blogger with Slate, has decided that proof-of-payment fare-collection systems—in which fares are enforced by inspectors who levy steep fines when they catch you without a proper ticket—are better...
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THERE is no doubt about the big news of the day; the market is waiting to see what the Federal Reserve says about the future pace of quantitative easing. Tapering has gone from being defined on Wikipedia as "the practice of reducing exercise in the days...
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LORD DAVID SAINSBURY has been a leader in business and government. His new book, "Progressive Capitalism", offers suggestions for making a faulty system better Follow paywall rules...
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AMID the hype in the run-up to the Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland, some NGO types seemed to have convinced themselves that the leaders would agree to do whatever it took to hunt down tax dodgers and demolish the walls of secrecy that shield...
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WHEN Matthias Henze needed to let off some steam in the early days of his start-up, he would pop outside the farmhouse he shared with his two co-founders, Fridtjof Detzner and Christian Springub, and chop some wood. The three (pictured from left to...
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Last July Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, spoke of the ECB's intent to do "whatever it takes" to hold the euro area together. In the months after his comment, the ECB unveiled its Outright Monetary Transactions programme, in which...
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IT WAS in the summer of 1941, two years after the start of the second world war, when Benjamin Britten first learned about George Crabbe, a late 18th-century English poet, surgeon and clergyman. “I did not know any of the poems of Crabbe at that time,”...
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A SCANDAL including a love affair, the abuse of secret services and alleged corruption swept away Petr Nečas, the Czech Republic's prime minister, and his centre-right cabinet nearly a year before elections were scheduled. The outgoing ruling coalition...
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POLANA CANIÇO lies just two miles from the city centre of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital (pictured). Almost all the houses in this small residential neighbourhood stand one-story tall and are owned or rented by Mozambican families. That is unlikely...
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WITH stunning speed, protests that started on June 6th in São Paulo over a 20-centavo (nine-cent) hike in bus fares have morphed into the biggest street demonstrations Brazil has seen since more than 20 years ago, when citizens took to the streets to...
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IN GREEK mythology the firmament was held aloft by a titan, one of a race of deities descended from Earth and sky. So it is fitting that the Milky Way 2, or Tianhe-2 in Chinese, surpassed an American machine called Titan to become the world' fastest...
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AS HEALTH ministers from the G8 countries meet for the first time in five years, Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, explains why politicians need to respond to the rise in resistance to antibiotics Follow paywall rules...
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YESTERDAY, the Financial Times' Robin Harding dropped a stone on the toe of previously buoyant markets:Ben Bernanke is likely to signal that the US Federal Reserve is close to tapering down its $85bn-a-month in asset purchases when he holds a press...
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How the world's population has changedTHE world in 1950 looked very different from how it does now. Europe was home to 22% of the world's 2.3 billion people. Germany, Britain, Italy and France all counted among the 12 most populous countries. But strong...
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LIFE seems good for easyJet's CEO, Carolyn McCall. In May the low-cost carrier that she has run since 2012 agreed to pay £20m to buy 25 pairs of slots at Gatwick airport from flybe. Then earlier this month it revealed that it had flown 60m passengers...
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DEVELOPING countries’ import cover, measured as the number of months of imports foreign reserves could pay for, has fallen since 2009. According to the latest Global Economic Prospects report by the World Bank, South Asia has seen the biggest decline,...
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ANY sane public discussion of the government surveillance brought to light by Edward Snowden's leaks must eventually get around to discussing the costs and benefits of the current practices of America's intelligence agencies. Of course, this discussion...
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OUR sister blog, Schumpeter, has published a note on transparency in Canada's extractive industries. Read it here Follow paywall rules...
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THE markets watch America's Federal Reserve for signs of "tapering", Britain's chancellor of the exchequer talks about bank privatisation, and Detroit's pensions scheme comes under more scrutiny Follow paywall rules...
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APPARENTLY someone, perhaps John Kenneth Galbraith, once said that the way to debate Milton Friedman was to wait for him to say "Let us assume..." and then immediately interrupt and say "No, let's not assume that." (Via Clay Shirky, via Dan Davies.)...
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STEPHEN HARPER, Canada’s prime minister, made a splash on the eve of this week’s G8 summit of large industrialised economies. His government, he announced on June 12th, would make it mandatory for resource companies to disclose payments to governments,...
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“AT FIRST glance Croatia and Finland share a great many common features,” said Esko Aho (pictured), a former prime minister of Finland, when visiting Zagreb a few weeks ago. Mr Aho visited Croatia to talk about the reforms he introduced during his...
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EDWARD SNOWDEN, the erstwhile IT guy who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and is responsible for the Powerpoint heard 'round the world, is ___________.(a) a hero(b) a narcissist(c) a traitor(d) courageous(e) all of the aboveThe contest to...
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Who drinks most vodka, gin, whisky and rum?ASIA'S growing middle classes are driving demand in the global spirits market. According to IWSR, a market-research firm, consumption last year grew by 1.6% to 27 billion litres—and China, the world’s biggest...
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Last July Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, spoke of the ECB's intent to do "whatever it takes" to hold the euro area together. In the months after his comment, the ECB unveiled its Outright Monetary Transactions programme, in which...
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ON JUNE 6th Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, gave his first major interview in 22 years. In it, Mr dos Santos said that the statesman he most admires is Brazil’s former president, Lula da Silva, because of his work to forge a more inclusive...
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BANKRUPT American Airlines, which is in the midst of joining with US Airways in what is expected to be the last big merger of American carriers, has announced plans to add more seats to its Boeing 737s and McDonnell Douglas MD-80s. Mark Gerchick, who...
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THE policy that gave teeth to the “do whatever it takes” commitment that Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank (ECB) made last July still remains untested in action. So potent was the policy specified in September with its pledge to...
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LAST week Cardiff Garcia produced a lovely taxonomy of views on the proper composition of stimulus. The idea is that there is a large group of economists and economics writers who think most rich-world economies are suffering from a demand shortfall....
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EVEN if you fear terrorists more than you do eavesdroppers, there is a risk that information America's government has deemed classified will be dumped on the web, say our correspondents Follow paywall rules...
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THE capitulation came suddenly. On June 7th Southern California Edison, the majority owner of the San Onofre nuclear power station midway between Los Angeles and San Diego, surprised everyone by announcing it was retiring the troubled plant for good....
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