Will empty shopfronts revive as New York comes back to life?
SIT BY BAR Pisellino, a chic watering hole in the West Village, a swanky neighbourhood in Manhattan, and the world seems to have righted itself. Patrons munch on fat green olives and sip fizzy aperitifs as they watch well-heeled shoppers, newly returned to the streets, go by.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the…
More evidence emerges of India’s true death toll from covid-19
Jun 12th 2021AS INDIA’S FEARSOME second wave of covid-19 recedes, the fact that fewer are falling ill is not the only cause for relief. On June 7th Narendra Modi, the prime minister, announced a policy switch that should make it easier for more Indians to get vaccinated. Instead of forcing individual states to compete in…
An influencer’s rant overshadows an ecological disaster in Sri Lanka
FOR TWO weeks an inferno blazed on the X-Press Pearl, a container ship, off Sri Lanka’s western coast. Its cargo—everything from frozen fish to hazardous chemicals and tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles—burned up or spilled into the ocean. Eventually, on June 2nd, the ship sank. Nurdles and other debris are washing up on beaches.…
Nigeria’s Twitter ban prompts ridicule—and fear
SNUFFING OUT free expression used to be pleasingly simple for autocrats. Back in 1984, when President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria first ran the country, as a military dictator, he simply arrested journalists and then decreed retroactively that any person who had published something that brought the government “ridicule or disrepute” was “guilty of an offence”.…
Why are Morocco’s famed artisans paving roads in the desert?
A LITTLE MORE than a century ago, Boujemâa Lamali, an Algerian by birth, was recruited to Morocco by its French colonial administrators. His mission: to revive the country’s tradition of artistic pottery. So Lamali set up a school in Safi, on the Atlantic coast. The city became a hub for artisans. Before the pandemic some…
Laysan albatross have only two main nesting sites
Jun 12th 2021ON THE FACE of things, the Laysan albatross is doing fairly well. Its population is estimated at around 1.6m, and may be growing. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies it as “near-threatened”, putting it on the second rung from the bottom of the organisation’s seven-rung ladder to extinction. A cause…
Quantum weirdness helps design better accelerometers
Jun 12th 2021“BUILD A BETTER accelerometer and the world will make a beaten path to your door.” Not, perhaps, as snappy as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s original aphorism about a mousetrap. But it is the hope of Graeme Malcolm, a physicist at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow. Dr Malcolm’s speciality is high-purity lasers. These can…
Slow jobs growth may not be a bad sign for America’s recovery
Jun 12th 2021AMERICA’S LATEST jobs reports landed with resounding thuds. Upbeat Wall Street forecasters had expected firms to add 1m new jobs in April. Employers made them look foolish, taking on just under 300,000 new workers instead. Punters lowered their expectations for May but still wound up disappointed, when on June 4th the Bureau of…
Why the market for secondhand private-equity stakes is thriving
Jun 12th 2021AT MIDNIGHT ON August 31st 1602, the public offering of shares in a new kind of enterprise closed. The charter for the venture, the Dutch East India Company, granted it a monopoly on trade with Asia until 1623, at which time, it was assumed, the firm would be liquidated. Twenty-one years is a…
The Quad is finding its purpose, at last
Jun 12th 2021ON AGAIN, OFF AGAIN for years, the security grouping known as the Quad appears in recent months to be gaining purpose at last. Not least, the two members who are not part of the G7, Australia and India, have been invited to attend that club’s summit in Britain between June 11th and 13th,…