Companies cast off their reluctance to invest
Oct 7th 2021COMPANIES’ enthusiasm for investment faded after the global financial crisis, and took a huge hit when covid-19 struck. But even those that have been stingy in the past decade, such as miners and shipping firms, are expected to loosen the purse strings this year and next. One exception is oil-and-gas companies, many of…
Emmanuel Macron hosts a different sort of Africa summit
A YEAR AGO Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian post-colonial writer, lambasted Emmanuel Macron’s Africa policy. Has France, he wrote, still not “understood that, far from being transitory, the discredit into which France has fallen is a structural and multi-generational phenomenon and not the result of the victimisation of a few ex-colonised people?”Listen to this storyYour browser…
Veteran Actor Julie Andrews Is Currently Trending on Twitter, and Here are Some Fun Memes To Show Why
The words ‘Julie Andrews’ are currently viral on Twitter after two popular YouTube content creators declared that they don’t know who the actress is. The YouTubers Quackity and Sapnap are two popular content creators that usually live stream their gaming on Minecraft. The two are quite popular in the gaming industry and both are, currently,…
Taco Bell Launches a $5 per Month Subscription and Should the Internet Even Rejoice About it?
Published on Sep 14, 2021 by AnneThe latest Taco Bell 30-day subscription immediately made headlines and the first question in everyone’s mind is – should we even be rejoicing about it? For only $5 per month, Taco Bell promises to give a free taco every day for its subscribers for 30 days. The internet is…
The Moon and Mars give up more secrets
Oct 7th 2021THIS PICTURE of a set of sedimentary rocks, just published in Science, could have come from any geology textbook. Its illustration of the bottomset-foreset-topset transition found in river deltas is a classic of stratigraphy. Except that, technically, it is not a geological feature at all. The word “geology” derives from the Greek for…
A different approach to investing in developing countries
Oct 9th 2021FORTY YEARS ago Antoine van Agtmael of the International Finance Corporation pitched the idea of a “Third World Equity Fund” to sceptical fund managers, and the concept of emerging markets entered global investing. The aim had been to offer diversified exposure to fast-growing countries outside the rich world. Since then emerging and developing…
Could a $1trn coin end America’s debt-ceiling showdown?
Oct 9th 2021“IT IS A mining rock of such resistance, that it is not easy to cut with the force of blows on a steel anvil.” So wrote Antonio de Ulloa, a Spanish traveller to America, about platinum in 1748. Such an image may resonate with those frustrated by regular showdowns over America’s debt ceiling.…
Asian countries are at last abandoning zero-covid strategies
Oct 7th 2021FOR MUCH of the pandemic, many of the wealthier countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region have pursued a “zero-covid” strategy, whether explicit or not. The success of the approach, involving closed borders, quarantine hotels and severe lockdowns, has generally been spectacular. Hong Kong has had no locally transmitted infections since mid-August. In…
Iraq’s election could be worthless if few turn out to vote
Oct 7th 2021A FATWA ISSUED by Ali al-Sistani, an influential Grand Ayatollah, was all it took to push Iraq’s Shia Muslims into risking death in battle with the jihadists of Islamic State in 2014. But his edicts seem to be having less success at persuading Iraqis to stroll sedately to the ballot booth to vote…
Gulf states are trying to increase private employment
BY NOW GULF rulers have tried almost everything. For much of the region’s modern history well-paid government jobs have been a birthright for citizens. This perk forms the core of the region’s social contracts: cushy, lucrative employment in exchange for the deprivation of political rights. Worried about growing populations and uncertain oil revenues, though, Gulf…