America files a new financial salvo at Beijing
May 14th 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 hubLAST SEPTEMBER a leak suggested that Donald Trump’s administration was mulling steps…
South-East Asia’s biggest river is drying up
FISH WRITHE frantically in the shallow pool, as their schoolmates stranded on the exposed sandbar breathe their last. It is November, the end of the monsoon season, yet the water in the Mekong river is perilously low. On this stretch, in north-eastern Thailand, the bank is so parched the earth has cracked, and once-leafy bushes…
Why covid-19 seems to spread more slowly in Africa
May 16th 2020JOHANNESBURGIT WAS NOT what fishermen usually mean by a good catch. Last month a worker at a fish factory in Tema, a port city in Ghana, infected 533 people with the virus behind covid-19. President Nana Akufo-Addo linked the “super-spreader” to about 10% of the country’s 5,408 cases.That Ghana could identify the person…