Are dictatorships better than democracies at fighting climate change?
Sep 21st 2019IT IS NOT just that Asia accounts for the greatest proportion of the world’s carbon emissions, with China the biggest emitter, India the third-biggest, and Japan, South Korea and Indonesia all among the top dozen. Asians are also the most vulnerable to climate catastrophe, with melting Tibetan glaciers, less predictable rains upon which…
Climate change is forcing Asian cities to rethink their flood defences
Sep 21st 2019JAKARTA AND SINGAPOREIN NORTH JAKARTA, not far from a quayside where workers unload frozen mackerel, a derelict building stands a metre deep in murky water. The warehouse was flooded in 2007, after torrential rains and a tidal surge submerged half the city under nearly four metres of water, displacing half a million people…
South Sudan’s war has cooled
Sep 21st 2019IN JULY 2016 Riek Machar, a rebel leader who was then first vice-president of the world’s newest country, fled South Sudan on foot. Fighting had broken out in the capital, Juba, between his forces and those of the president, Salva Kiir. Under fire from helicopter gunships, some 2,000 of his soldiers and their…
Climate change is making it harder to reduce poverty in Malawi
Sep 19th 2019KAMWENDOLIKE MOST Malawians, Wema Kaloti lives off the land. She grows maize on her family plot in Kamwendo, a village in the south of the country. But farming is getting harder as rainfall grows erratic. “Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little,” she says, glancing at the sky. Yields have dwindled. A hectare that…
Israel’s prime minister will desperately struggle to stay in office
Sep 19th 2019JERUSALEMBINYAMIN NETANYAHU spent the last two hours of voting in Israel’s general election on September 17th speaking through a camera to an online audience, begging people to come out and vote for Likud, his ruling party, before it was too late. “All the battles I fought as a soldier in an elite unit,…
Despite American shale, oil markets still rely on Saudi Arabia
Sep 19th 2019THE WORLD’S oil markets depend on Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned giant. In turn Aramco depends on Abqaiq. Crude from Saudi Arabia’s legendary oil fields—Ghawar, Khurais, Shaybah—comes to Abqaiq to be processed, coursing through its sprawling network of pipes, spheroids and stabilisation towers before being sent to customers around the world. Last year…
An accident in Russia points to the risks of atomic aviation
Aug 15th 2019IN 1957 WORK began on Project Pluto, a treetop-skimming American missile loaded with hydrogen bombs. Nothing odd about that, except that the missile itself was also to be propelled by nuclear energy. A reactor on board would suck in air, heat and thus expand it, and then hurl it out of the back…
As face-recognition technology spreads, so do ideas for subverting it
Aug 15th 2019POWERED BY advances in artificial intelligence (AI), face-recognition systems are spreading like knotweed. Facebook, a social network, uses the technology to label people in uploaded photographs. Modern smartphones can be unlocked with it. Some banks employ it to verify transactions. Supermarkets watch for under-age drinkers. Advertising billboards assess consumers’ reactions to their contents.…
Two treatments for Ebola emerge from a clinical trial in Africa
Aug 15th 2019NEWS ABOUT Ebola, a viral disease that kills up to 90% of those it infects, is usually grim. The latest outbreak, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has thus far killed nearly 1,900 people and rages on. But on August 12th the grimness lifted somewhat with the announcement that two anti-Ebola treatments…
Gloom from the climate-change front line
Aug 10th 2019AFTER 29 HOURS of uninterrupted negotiations the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on how alterations in land use are contributing to such change, was gavelled through in Geneva on the afternoon of August 7th. When, minutes later, your correspondent asked to speak with some of the researchers, she…