Hard questions as scientists and governments seek covid-19 vaccines
Aug 8th 2020Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hubSLOWLY BUT surely the economic costs of the covid-19 pandemic are becoming clear. On July 30th America’s statisticians revealed that the economy shrank by 9.5%, year…
Official economic forecasts for poor countries are too rosy
Aug 4th 2020MOST PEOPLE, when presented with bad news, tend to play it down. Even professional economic forecasters are not immune to the temptations of hope. In February more than 500m people in China were experiencing some form of lockdown, and covid-19 had spread to Italy. Yet the IMF said that in its base-case forecast…
The Rajapaksas secure a firm grip on Sri Lanka
A landslide victory gives the hard men a chance to change the constitution and strengthen their powerAug 7th 2020IT WAS A complete trouncing. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP—Sri Lanka People’s Front) of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa won almost two-thirds of the 225 seats in Parliament in the general election held on August 5th. It cements…
Zimbabwe’s white farmers are promised a speck of compensation
Aug 7th 2020TWO DECADES after President Robert Mugabe began to steal most of the 5,000-odd farms owned by whites in Zimbabwe, an agreement to give them a morsel of compensation has been struck—on paper. Whether it will add up to a sheaf of tobacco leaves or go up in a puff of smoke is too…
An exception to the rule that there are no marine insects
Aug 8th 2020INSECTS DOMINATE dry land. About 1m species have been described, more than twice as many as all other multicellular animal species, terrestrial and marine, put together. Several times that number are reckoned to await discovery. The oceans, though, are mostly insect-free. A few skate over the surface, but none dive willingly below the…
A new AI language model generates poetry and prose
Aug 8th 2020The SEC said, “Musk,/your tweets are a blight./They really could cost you your job,/if you don’t stop/all this tweetingat night.”/…Then Musk cried, “Why?/The tweets I wrote are not mean,/I don’t use all-caps/and I’m sure that my tweets are clean.”/“But your tweets can move markets/and that’s why we’re sore./You may be a genius/and a…
Why European banks expect fewer bad loans than American rivals
Aug 8th 2020ANALYSTS HAD expected a blistering earnings season for European banks, which reported their second-quarter results in late July and early August. And painfully hot it was, with profits melting away as lenders made provisions for future loan losses. On August 3rd HSBC, Europe’s largest bank by assets, said that its post-tax profits had…
Do Alipay and Tenpay misuse their market power?
“LET THE users decide who wins the game, not monopoly and power.” So said Jack Ma in 2014 when Alipay, the slick payment service he created, came under attack from China’s lumbering state-owned banks. Six years on, the users have decided, and Alipay and its rival, Tenpay, known mainly for WeChat Pay, have won. There…
Australia’s internal travel restrictions are tested in court
TOO MANY roads cross the southern border of the state of Queensland for police to patrol them all. Instead, the authorities have been setting up waist-high plastic barricades to block small streets that lead to neighbouring New South Wales near the sprawling city of Gold Coast. The intention is to prevent people entering Queensland from…
India’s ruling party replaces a mosque with a Hindu temple
THIRTY YEARS ago a thrusting activist called Narendra Modi helped to organise a month-long political procession across northern India. The Ram Rath Yatra began at the city of Somnath, in his home state of Gujarat, and snaked up and down the country on its way to a mosque in the city of Ayodhya in the…