A dynamic Emmanuel Macron and a diminished Angela Merkel point to a new order in Europe Who leads Europe? At the start of this year, the answer was obvious. Angela Merkel was trundling unstoppably towards a fourth election win, while Britain was out, Italy down and stagnating France gripped by the fear that Marine Le Pen might become the Gallic Donald Trump. This week, it all looks very differen..
But does it play fair? If Donald Trump had slapped punitive tariffs on all Chinese exports to America, as he promised, he would have started a trade war. Fortunately, the president hesitated, partly because he wants China's help in thwarting North Korea's nuclear ambitions. But that is not the end of the story. Tensions over China's industrial might now threaten the architecture of the global ec..
Rodrigo Duterte bears many similarities to Thaksin Shinawatra When Filipinos attempt to explain the political success of their tough-guy president, Rodrigo Duterte, they tend to point to local precursors. Joseph Estrada, a former matinée idol who had often played Robin Hood types, rose to the presidency by promising to be hard on bad guys and good to the poor. And then there is Ferdinand Marcos,..
The president's response to the bombing in London shows the bias at the heart of his executive order Less than a month before the Supreme Court considers the legality of his executive order barring travel from six overwhelmingly Muslim countries, Donald Trump has handed a gift to those challenging the ban. Reacting to a bombing on the London underground on September 15th, Mr Trump first condemne..
Science will win the technical battle against cancer. But that is only half the fight The numbers are stark. Cancer claimed the lives of 8.8m people in 2015; only heart disease caused more deaths. Around 40% of Americans will be told they have cancer during their lifetimes. It is now a bigger killer of Africans than malaria. But the statistics do not begin to capture the fear inspired by cancer'..
Google a photoshopped hoover What else could you call a photocopier? If you answer "a Xerox machine", you are one of the many people for whom the brand name and the generic item are one and the same. Like many brands that have gone generic, xerox is often lower-case and used as a verb. There are many more of these than people realize: aspirin was once Aspirin, a trademark of Bayer, which was for..
From Canada to Oceania, Guineas are in abundant supply Guinea. Equatorial Guinea. Guinea-Bissau. Papua New Guinea. The Gulf of Guinea. Guinea, Virginia. Guinea, Nova Scotia. The world has more Guineas than a pirate's treasure chest. What explains the prevalence of the name? Etymologists dispute the earliest origins of the word "Guinea". Some trace it to a word in Tuareg, a Berber language, for b..
Machines that read faces are coming Modern artificial intelligence is much feted. But its talents boil down to a superhuman ability to spot patterns in large volumes of data. Facebook has used this ability to produce maps of poor regions in unprecedented detail, with an AI system that has learned what human settlements look like from satellite pictures. Medical researchers have trained AI in sma..
These distinctions explain both the chancellor's strengths and her weaknesses Angela Merkel is the longest-serving head of government in the EU. When she became chancellor, in 2005, her international counterparts were George W Bush, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac. She became leader of the CDU during the Clinton administration. Yet after all this time, she remains a conundrum to many. Der Spiegel ..
It may settle for more powerful conventional arms instead The runaways pace of North Korea's nuclear development has confounded predictions and diverted the attention of world leaders. It is also meddling with one North Korean grandmother's retirement plans. Ri Chun Hee, a veteran broadcaster at Korean Central Television, was promised a rest in 2012, after 41 years gleefully reading out propagan..
The next Republican civil war looms "DACA will continue to exist in Chicago," promises Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, half an hour before President Donald Trump's administration announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival programme, known as DACA. Ending DACA is morally, politically and economically wrong, says Mr Emanuel, the grandson of a Jewish immigrant who as a boy o..
As keen fans make and distribute models of protected intellectual property, copyright-owners are mulling their response Three-dimensional (3D) printers have proliferated in homes, schools and workplaces over the past five years. Last year more than 420,000 desktop-sized 3D printers, which make things by depositing one thin layer of material over another, much as printers ink a page one line at a..
But it may not have been the sort of powerful miniaturized warhead the rogue state claimed The skies to the east of the Korean peninsula have seen no fewer than 14 missile launches this year, but on September 3rd it was events underground that caused alarm. Several meteorological agencies reported a powerful earthquake in North Korea, centered on a known nuclear test site in North Hamgyong provi..
They face an uphill battle Loftily as they may disdain the profit motive, Britain's judges are, on a national level, money-spinners. English law is often specified as the one under which commercial contracts are to be interpreted and enforced. And disputes often end up being heard in British courts. But, like any business, the law is competitive, and other jurisdictions want to snatch a share of..
Unilever is the world's biggest experiment in corporate do-gooding Paul Polman runs Europe's seventh-most valuable company, Unilever, worth $176bn, but he is not a typical big cheese. A Dutchman who once considered becoming a priest, he believes that selling shampoo around the world can be a higher calling and detests the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of shareholder primacy, which holds that a firm's chi..