Bukom boxers draw on a long fighting tradition
Nov 28th 2019ACCRA“THIS IS WHERE the magic happens,” says Carl Lokko, a boxing coach. His gym in Accra, the capital of Ghana, has two punchbags, a weights machine and a tin roof. A dozen young men, all sweat and sinew, are shadow-boxing or skipping furiously. “Everybody wants to be a boxer,” says one, fists thudding…
Some planks from ancient Rome started life in eastern France
Dec 5th 2019THESE OAKplanks, once part of the portico of a property just outside Imperial Rome, travelled a long way before the builders got their hands on them. The science of dating trees by looking at their growth rings is now so good that Mauro Bernabei of Italy’s National Research Council and his colleagues were…
Electrical energy can be captured as liquid air
Nov 30th 2019IN THE PAST few decades wind and solar power have gone from being exotic technologies to quotidian pieces of engineering that are competitive, joule for joule, with fossil fuels. Those fuels retain what edge they have only because of their reliability. The wind may not blow, or the sun may not shine, but—short…
America seeks faster ways to launch military satellites
Dec 5th 2019BY SHOOTING A missile into one of its own satellites in March, India upped the ante. The immediate intention, suggests Jeffrey Caton, a retired American air-force colonel who teaches at the Army War College, was to fire “a shot across the bow” of India’s rival China. The Chinese had, after all, blown up…
Malaria infections have stopped falling
Dec 5th 2019AFEW YEARS ago it looked as if malaria might be on the way out. From 2000 to 2014 the number of cases and deaths fell. As the World Health Organisation’s annual report on the disease shows, though, the decline in cases has ended (see chart) and that in deaths has slowed. The report,…
Trade war? China’s exporters have expanded their global market share
Dec 12th 2019SHANGHAIA YEAR AGO an economic forecasting unit in the Chinese government published an outlook for the coming year. The big worry, it concluded, was the external environment. Shipments to America, China’s biggest customer, would suffer as the trade war dragged on. China had maxed out its exports to other big countries, and others…
Why the revised USMCA pleases both Democrats and Donald Trump
On this trade deal, their interests are alignedDec 11th 2019Editor’s note (December 11th): This article has been updated.UNION LEADERS and Democratic lawmakers were cool at first towards the USMCA, a replacement for the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which was signed by American, Canadian and Mexican trade negotiators over a year ago. But…
America wants the World Bank to stop making loans to China
Dec 12th 2019HONG KONGTHE CARIBBEAN islands of St. Kitts and Nevis are known for luxury tourism (visitors include Meryl Streep and Oprah Winfrey), pricey citizenship (on sale for $150,000), and a sprint world champion (Kim Collins). But despite the country’s many assets (including a national income per person of over $18,000) it is eligible for…
Climate change has made ESG a force in investing
Dec 7th 2019“LABELLING BASED on incomplete information, public shaming, and shunning wrapped in moral rhetoric,” said Hester Peirce, a straight-talking commissioner at America’s main financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, in June. She was taking aim at the scoring systems that purport to assess firms’ performance based on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.…
Singapore strikes its first official blows against fake news
Dec 7th 2019SINGAPORE“FACEBOOK IS LEGALLY required to tell you that the Singapore government says this post has false information,” reads the message, which links to a government website. It appeared on November 30th on a post published by the States Times Review, a blog which delights in hectoring the Singaporean authorities. The post alleged that…