Covid stops many migrants sending money home
Editor’s note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hubWHEN A VIRUS spreads, so does hardship. A partial lockdown in Uganda has forced…
Desperate Iranians are getting bad medical advice
Apr 18th 2020Editor’s note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hub“DRENCH COTTON wool in violet oil before bedtime,” instructs Abbas Tabrizian, then…
Saudi Arabia looks for an exit to the war in Yemen
Apr 18th 2020RARELY HAS Saudi Arabia sounded so magnanimous. For five years it has been fighting the Houthis, a group of Shia rebels in Yemen, on behalf of the government they toppled. The war has devastated Yemen’s infrastructure and killed more than 100,000 people. But on April 8th Saudi Arabia and its allies promised to…
Arabs and Persians are battling it out—virtually
Editor’s note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For our coronavirus tracker and more coverage, see our hubIT WAS A fraught conversation, but not for the reason many are these days.…
Acts of kindness prevent a downward spiral from solitude to loneliness
Apr 18th 2020LONELINESS IS BAD for your health—certainly as bad as being obese, and possibly as bad as being a moderate smoker. So, in these days of plague, when enforced solitude is the order of the day in many places, how to stop solitude turning into loneliness is a pressing medical question.One part of the…
Bats spread viruses
Apr 18th 2020WHICH ANIMAL SARS-CoV-2 leapt from to infect human beings remains unknown. But the evidence suggests that bats were involved at some point—perhaps not as the immediate source of the virus, but probably as the reservoir from which it ultimately came.Almost certainly that was true of the virus which caused the original SARS outbreak,…
The dollar’s dominance masks China’s rise in finance
Apr 16th 2020HONG KONG AND NEW YORKIN HONG KONG’s deserted airport, two cash machines face each other. One is run by HSBC, a British bank that is one of the territory’s main conduits for accessing American dollars. The other, operated by the Bank of China, dispenses Hong Kong dollars and Chinese yuan. Flashing in the…
Why has China’s stimulus been so stingy?
GOLDEN EAGLE WORLD is a glistening monument to commerce, a nine-storey mall with endless stores and restaurants, virtual-reality arcades and spas, even a zoo. But it is now trying something more basic, setting up food stalls outside to drum up business. Although China is back to work, customers have been slow to return. The giant…
How deep will downturns in rich countries be?
Those in central and southern Europe seem most vulnerableApr 16th 2020AS THE VIRUS upends productive activity across the world, the question now is how bad things will get. On April 14th the IMF warned that the global recession would be the deepest for the best part of a century. But the severity of the pandemic…
The World Health Organisation is under fire by America’s president
Mostly, though, his charges are trumped upApr 16th 2020DONALD TRUMP, America’s president, often acts as if he has never seen an international body that he likes the look of. The latest group in his cross-hairs is the World Health Organisation (WHO), together with its leader, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a microbiologist who was once Ethiopia’s health…