The Mozambique civil war created tuskless elephants
Oct 23rd 2021EVOLUTION ENSURES that animals are well-adapted to their circumstances. Sometimes, as with predators and prey, those circumstances include the behaviour of other creatures. And, as a paper just published in Science describes, that includes the behaviour of human beings, which can force drastic changes on a species in an evolutionary eyeblink.Shane Campbell-Staton, a…
How soaring energy costs could hobble the covid-19 recovery
Oct 23rd 2021FUEL PRICES over the past month show the same vertiginous upward slope as a covid-19 case count during a particularly brutal wave. Coal and gas prices have touched all-time highs. Asian spot prices for gas have jumped by nearly 1,000% in the past year. The cost of oil has soared as shortages of…
Why it matters when trades settle
Oct 23rd 2021THE PAEANS that followed the recent retirement of KKR founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts, formerly private equity’s barbarians-in-chief, are a reminder that the story of Wall Street is one of big deals, bold trades and the people behind them. Those further behind them, in the “back offices” of banks, brokers and buy-out…
Restarting Asian tourism will be harder than shutting it down
Oct 23rd 2021CALL IT AN October surprise. Almost every day over the past two weeks countries across Asia have revealed plans to loosen pandemic-induced restrictions on inbound tourism. India went first, announcing on October 7th that it would at last resume issuing tourist visas for visitors from all countries on November 15th. Two days later…
The Taliban find themselves on the wrong side of an insurgency
AS SOON AS the first gunshots echoed across the courtyard from the street outside, the congregation began to scatter. The worshippers at Kandahar’s Bibi Fatima mosque were all too aware of the fate of their fellow Shia Muslims in Kunduz a week earlier and immediately started running. The warning came too late. Suicide-bombers had shot…
Iran’s impressive collection of Western art
Oct 23rd 2021DAYS BEFORE Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, won Iran’s presidential election in June, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art reopened to the public after a long refurbishment. It made for a strange juxtaposition. Mr Raisi celebrates the decline of American influence; his culture minister rails against “the deviation and secularism” of Iran’s art…
How an investigation led to a gun battle in Lebanon
IT WAS SUPPOSED to be a speech to celebrate a Muslim holiday, yet Hassan Nasrallah devoted a striking amount of it to a Christian politician, Samir Geagea. There was not much cause for celebration anyway. The leader of Hizbullah, a Shia political party-cum-militia, was speaking on October 18th, four days after an hours-long gun battle…
The hard job of teaching autonomous cars to drive
Oct 20th 2021WHEN DRIVING, Clara-Marina Martinez makes a note of any unusual behaviour she sees on the road. She then feeds these into machine-learning algorithms, a form of AI, which she is helping develop for Porsche Engineering, a division of the eponymous German sports-car company.Those algorithms are intended to produce a system reliable enough for…
Servicing and repairing electric cars requires new skills
Oct 20th 2021AS A STRING of high-performance cars thunder round the twists and turns of Hockenheimring F1 circuit, in south-west Germany, a stripped-down vehicle at an adjacent Porsche customer centre offers a peek inside a speedy but far quieter way of getting round the track. Christian Brügger, a product engineer with Porsche, a sports-car maker…
Jens Weidmann steps down from the Bundesbank
IN 2012 Mario Draghi, then head of the European Central Bank (ECB), vowed to do “whatever it takes” to keep Europe’s single currency together. His biggest foe in this endeavour was not the bond vigilantes sending yields spiralling in Greece and Italy—they were soon cowed—but a sceptical colleague. Jens Weidmann, who as head of the…