Finding bodies in forests
Sep 3rd 2020THE BODY FARM, known officially as the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility, is a gruesome place. It is a hectare of land near Knoxville, cut off from the rest of the world by razor wire, that has, for more than three decades, been at the forefront of forensic science. It is both…
How to forecast armies’ will to fight
Sep 3rd 2020IN JUNE 2014 around 1,500 partisans of Islamic State (IS) attacked Mosul, a city in northern Iraq. They were outnumbered almost 15 to one by government troops defending the place. The result was a rout. But not in the direction those numbers might have suggested. In the face of the enemy, the government…
Referendums in the Pacific are attracting attention faraway
TESTING THE popular will does not come naturally to Melanesian governments. Policy decisions are normally taken behind closed doors, away from the prying eyes of the general public. That may now be changing. New Caledonia, still a French possession, and Bougainville, an island at the eastern end of Papua New Guinea (PNG), held referendums on…
Koalas almost bring down an Australian state government
EVERYONE LIKES koalas. Lots of people worry about their dwindling numbers. When fires tore along Australia’s east coast last summer, some humans risked their lives to rescue them. Strange, then, that a dispute about their conservation almost blew up a harmonious coalition government in New South Wales.Its two contingents, the Liberals and the Nationals, have…
The quest for secure property rights in Africa
BUILDERS ARE busy outside Louisa Qangiso’s house in Khayelitsha, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town. The 49-year-old is putting up eight studio flats in her backyard that she will rent out for 3,000 rand ($177) per month. This could almost triple the value of her property, from roughly 570,000 to 1.6m rand. These…
Bahrain joins the UAE in recognising Israel
An old Arab orthodoxy is swiftly falling apart, but it may not change Israel’s oldest conflictIT TOOK 72 years for the first Gulf state to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. The second needed just four weeks. On September 11th President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that Bahrain would recognise Israel. Less than a month earlier,…
What is fuelling China’s economic recovery?
“THE EIGHT HUNDRED” is an unusual Chinese film for its depiction of Nationalist soldiers as heroes in a grinding battle against Japanese invaders in 1937. The Nationalists, or Kuomintang, fought a long on-off civil war against the Communist Party and so are typically portrayed as villains and stooges on Chinese screens. From a global perspective,…
Is the world economy recovering?
Sep 16th 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 hubTHE WORST day of the covid-19 pandemic, at least from an economic perspective, was Good Friday. On April 10th lockdowns in many countries were at their…
Wildfires will be more common in a warming world
Sep 12th 2020CALIFORNIA BURNS every year. But amid a record-breaking heatwave, 2020 is the fieriest year yet (see map). As The Economist went to press, more than 7,600 fires had burned over 2.5m acres (1m hectares) of land. The season still has months to run.That fits a long-term trend, for California’s wildfires are getting steadily…
Some good news on covid-19
Sep 9th 2020THE BEST hope for ending the covid-19 pandemic is a vaccine. There is no shortage of candidates. The World Health Organisation is tracking 34 in various stages of development. How well they will work, though, is another matter. On September 9th AstraZeneca, a drug firm, announced it was pausing its trials after a…