The Economist (Asia Pacific)

Turmoil in Iran

AFTER MORE than two weeks of unrest, parts of Iran began to feel like a war zone. Snipers fired into crowds as surveillance drones buzzed overhead. Families crowded into morgues in desperate search for their loved ones. Ordinary people were afraid to...

Maduro on trial

WHEN AMERICAN prosecutors indict someone, they tend to keep it secret until an arrest is made lest the defendant skips town. But sometimes the charges are publicised first, especially when the target lives beyond the reach of the law. The point is...

Voters in rich countries who fret about “affordability” should be careful what they wish for:

Voters in rich countries who fret about “affordability” should be careful what they wish for: leader,

JANE AUSTEN, ECONOMIST

Apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of the European populist-right are bound to fail:

FOR THE respectable men running western Europe’s three biggest countries, misery is heaped upon misery. All are presiding over stagnant living standards and declining global influence. In Britain and France their rivals from the populist right are...

Artificial intelligence presents dazzling opportunities for children—and ominous risks: leader,

Two more industries that China is soon to dominate:

Two more industries that China is soon to dominate: leader,

Where the loosening of rules and tolerance of corruption in America will lead:

WHEN HARRY TRUMAN left office he had many opportunities to get rich. He turned them down. “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialise the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency,” he said....

China is providing cheap, clean energy in huge quantities. The world should take the win:

THE SCALE of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. By the end of last year, the country had installed 887 gigawatts of solar-power capacity—close to double Europe’s and America’s combined total. The 22m...

Trump and Xi meet

IT WAS MORE grand bazaar than grand bargain. After months of haggling, bluffing and fist-shaking, America and China appear to have a trade deal. Meeting in a pokey room at a South Korean airbase on October 30th, President Donald Trump and his...

After months of pain China is on top:

DONALD TRUMP and Xi Jinping are due to meet in South Korea next week. However, it is uncertain whether they actually will. Such is the shocking state of the world’s most important relationship. For weeks, America and China have been lashing out at each...

Unease in Caracas

SOME BELIEVE October 19th is the date to watch, when two Venezuelan saints will be canonised. Others think the order will come just before Christmas. Posters and graffiti that proclaim “It is happening!” persuade some that the United States’ Green...

The breakthrough in Gaza marks a new beginning for the Middle East. Now a radically different kind of peacemaking is needed:

PLENTY OF AMERICAN presidents have sought a breakthrough in the bitter conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Now, two years after the atrocities of October 7th and after endless rounds of killing in Gaza, Donald Trump has joined the tiny list...

Next term at SCOTUS

TWENTY-TWO years before he became America’s chief justice, John Roberts, then a junior lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s White House, quipped that “the constitution is safe for the summer” during the Supreme Court’s annual adjournment. No more. What was once a...

Well informed

Are touchscreens in cars dangerous? Probably—and safety organisations are beginning to take note,

Even if artificial intelligence achieves its potential, many people will lose their shirts:

Israel’s rampant settlers

ON SEPTEMBER 1ST, as Israeli children began the school year, toddlers entered their new nursery in Homesh, a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. Like many other Israeli schools and nurseries in the West Bank, it was built with government...

Donald Trump has triggered a trade and defence crisis: how should Narendra Modi respond?

IT IS UNUSUAL to experience humiliation, vindication and a defining test all at the same time. But that is India’s predicament today. President Donald Trump has undone 25 years of diplomacy by embracing Pakistan after its conflict with India in May,...

The fantasy of all-American chipmaking: leader,

HOW LOW mighty Intel has fallen. Half a century ago the American chipmaker was a byword for the cutting edge; it went on to dominate the market for personal-computer chips and in 2000 briefly became the world’s second-most-valuable company. Yet these...

Donald Trump’s capricious dealmaking destabilises the world:

WHEN DONALD TRUMP meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska it will be the seventh time the two have talked in person. This time is different, though. Since their last sit-down, Mr Putin has launched an unprovoked war, lost perhaps a million Russian soldiers...

MAGA and Israel

WHEN THE Speaker of the House of Representatives went to the Western Wall in Jerusalem on August 3rd, placing a handwritten note to God in its cracks, he declared: “Our prayer is that America will always stand with Israel.” Mike Johnson went on to...

If Silicon Valley’s predictions are even close to being accurate, expect unprecedented upheaval:

Progress against cancer has been slow, steady—and remarkable. Long may that continue:

Progress against cancer has been slow, steady—and remarkable. Long may that continue: leader, page 7.

The nerd:jock ratio in Britain’s government is askew,

“THE INBETWEENERS”, a cult sitcom broadcast between 2008 and 2010, has a surprising hold over British politics. It followed the lives of four teenage boys, offering an amusing portrait of the often psychopathic cruelty of British teen boys decades...

Trumponomics 2.0 is chipping away at the foundations of America’s prosperity:

Trumponomics 2.0 is chipping away at the foundations of America’s prosperity: leader, page 7.

Outsourcing in Africa

MERCY MUGURE first heard about business-process outsourcing ( BPO) in the mid-2000s. Word of how the practice was transforming India, its global champion, reached Africa, which had largely missed out on the fruits of globalisation. “We thought: why not...

Gucci’s owner is the latest troubled firm to seek an outside saviour,

Gucci’s owner is the latest troubled firm to seek an outside saviour THE RENAULT Twingo Equilibre is a pint-sized runaround for the thrifty. The special-edition Gucci Jackie Notte handbag is an iconic accessory for the loaded. Besides being available...

Getting aid to Gaza

WHEN HUNGER gnaws, any offer of food comes as a relief. And so just before dawn on June 1st Ayman, a former taxi-driver from northern Gaza displaced seven times since the start of the war, left his tent on the beach. He and his brother walked 5km...

The stunning decline of boy preference: leader,

WITHOUT FANFARE, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine...

Bibi’s addiction to crises

YOU MIGHT think it would be impossible for the inferno in Israel and Gaza to burn hotter. Yet Binyamin Netanyahu is fuelling three simultaneous emergencies: a humanitarian one in Gaza; a torching of support among European allies; and a constitutional...

To Lam, Vietnam’s Communist Party hard man, must rescue a great Asian success:

To Lam, Vietnam’s Communist Party hard man, must rescue a great Asian success: leader, page 7. The economy is booming, but the country’s new leader is worried: briefing,

The crypto industry dreamed of being above politics. It has become synonymous with self-dealing:

WHEN OFFERED a Boeing 747 by the government of Qatar to replace Air Force One, President Donald Trump responded: why not? Only someone dumb would turn down free money. No presidency has generated so many conflicts of interest at such speed in modern...

To American bosses, the tariff shock looks a lot like covid-19. It is worse,

The IRS mess

TO GET A sense of how bad things got in the recent past at the Internal Revenue Service ( IRS), America’s primary tax-collecting agency, consider a photo posted on Twitter by a Treasury advisor in 2022. It depicts the cafeteria at the organisation’s...

100 days of attitude

WASHINGTON, DC Congress is inert. Will courts step in? IT WAS APRIL 28TH 2017, the 99th day of his first administration, and President Donald Trump was frustrated. “It’s a very rough system, it’s an archaic system,” he vented to an interviewer about...

The global trade war could reverse Hong Kong’s commercial decline

The global trade war could reverse Hong Kong’s commercial decline,

Will China pounce?

CAMBODIANS AWOKE on April 3rd to learn that their exports to America would face tariffs of 49%. As they took in the news, experts warned that the country’s garment industry, which accounts for more than half of export revenues and sells most of its...

Banyan

Australia’s election kicks off. Both main parties may struggle to gain a majority,

Is Elon Musk remaking America’s government, or breaking it?

NEXT TO SPACE travel, remaking the government sounds easy. Elon Musk conceives of himself as the saviour of humanity, who will put people on Mars as a prelude to making humankind a multiplanetary species (see Science & technology section). But of all...

The right and Russia

RUSSOPHILIA WAS once an affliction of the American left, of socialists who made excuses for Stalinism or Soviet totalitarianism. No longer. One month ago, Glenn Greenwald, a heterodox American journalist once lionised by the left and now admired by the...

America’s bullied allies need a better plan than flattery and concessions: leader,

FOR DECADES America has stood by its friends and deterred its enemies. That steadfastness is being thrown upside down, as Donald Trump strong-arms allies and seeks deals with adversaries. After freezing all aid to Ukraine on March 3rd, his...

Donald Trump’s economic delusions are already hurting America: leader,

IN HIS SPEECH to Congress on March 4th President Donald Trump painted a fantastical picture. The American Dream, he declared, was surging bigger and better than ever before. His tariffs would preserve jobs, make America richer still, and protect its...

A mafia-like struggle for global power has begun, with new rules that do not suit America:

THE RUPTURE of the post-1945 order is gaining pace. In extraordinary scenes at the UN this week, America sided with Russia and North Korea against Ukraine and Europe. Germany’s probable new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warns that by June NATO may be...

African youth

SHE IS TRAINING to be a seamstress four days a week and works as a cook on two other days. In between, Grace Garus Dalop finds time to peddle wigs. Along with tips and financial help from neighbours and acquaintances, that is just enough for the...

Will DOGE wreck the Pentagon or reform it?

Online scamming is a vast, sophisticated and fast-growing global enterprise. Nobody is safe:

EDGAR MET Rita on LinkedIn. He worked for a Canadian software company, she was from Singapore and was with a large consultancy. They were just friends, but they chatted online all the time. One day Rita offered to teach him how to trade crypto. With...

Trump’s Latin America policy

THE TRADE war between the United States and Colombia on January 26th was over within a day—about the same time it took Teddy Roosevelt’s gunboats to engineer the secession of Panama from Colombia in 1903 as the prelude to digging the Panama Canal. Now,...

Is the Communist Party still popular?

CHINA’S ANNOUNCEMENT on January 17th that its economy had grown by an estimated 5% in 2024, right on target, was greeted with widespread disbelief on the country’s social media. “It feels unreal— everything around me seems so bleak,” wrote one netizen....

Schumpeter

The UFC, Dana White and the rise of bloodsport entertainment,

Deference is all around you, unfortunately,

ANIMALS HAVE evolved many different ways to signal submissiveness to their more powerful counterparts. Lower-ranking chimpanzees might greet a dominant chimp by producing a breathy sound known as a pant-grunt. Hanuman langurs present their...

For the first time in American politics, tech is joining the federal government. Prepare for a clash of cultures:

ALREADY THINGS have turned nasty. Donald Trump has not even got to the White House, and his raucous court of advisers have rounded on each other. In recent days Elon Musk and other tech tycoons have traded insults with the MAGA crowd over highly...

At the end of a year of violent upheaval and democratic resilience, we count curses and blessings:

OUR PAGES have been full of suffering in 2024. War has raged on three continents: the world watched Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine most closely, but the fighting in Sudan was the most deadly. Storms, tempests, floods and fires have ruined lives, and taken...

Insurance and violence

HOMICIDE INVESTIGATIONS are like bankruptcies: they come along gradually and then all at once. On December 9th, Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old engineering graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, was arrested and charged with...

Exemplar or warning? Australia wants to lead the big tech crackdown,

Javier Milei is idolised by the Trumpian right. They should get to know him better:

Javier Milei is idolised by the Trumpian right. They should get to know him better: leader,

Elon Musk is given the ultimate target: America’s government: leader,

IN 2017 ELON MUSK branded Donald Trump a “con man” and “one of the world’s best bullshitters”. Now he is known at Mar-a-Lago as Uncle Elon and is in the president-elect’s inner circle. This week they watched a rocket launch together. The alliance of...

What’s about to hit the world economy?

CRITICS ACCUSE Donald Trump of being too chaotic to get much done. The speed of his first appointments should disabuse them. The next administration means business. Stock and corporate-bond markets are broadly delighted with the prospect of...

Donald Trump’s sweeping victory will shake up everything: leader,

A STUNNING VICTORY has crowned Donald Trump the most consequential American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. After defeating Kamala Harris—and not just narrowly, but by a wide margin—America’s 45th president will become its 47th. The fact that Mr...

A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks:

A second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks: leader,

Our US election model: Trump ahead

The car industry may go the way of consumer electronics,

As Kamala Harris has moved closer to Donald Trump’s old policies, Mr Trump has grown more extreme: leader,

THE CHOICE facing America in less than a month will not be made by voters weighing rival sets of policies. Kamala Harris’s plans lack detail; Donald Trump’s are sometimes untethered from reality—and in any case divisions over culture motivate voters...

Kill or be killed is the Middle East’s new logic. Deterrence and diplomacy would be better:

EVER SINCE Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7th 2023, violence has been spreading. One year on, the Middle East is an inch away from an all-out war between Israel and Iran. Israel’s skilful decapitation of Hizbullah, a Lebanese militia backed...

The money race

CAMPAIGN fiNANCE has changed dramatically over the past 15 years, but not in ways that many expected. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 2010, Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, enabled expansive corporate spending and ignited fears...

Attacks on Hizbullah

FIRST IT WAS pagers; then, walkie-talkies. On September 18th another wave of explosions rocked Lebanon: two-way radios detonated in homes, offices and even at a funeral, a day after some 3,000 pagers blew up across the country and in Syria. In both...