Mario Draghi's successor must have expertise, judgement and political skills One of the biggest jobs in Europe is up for grabs: head of the European Central Bank (ECB). It sets interest rates across much of the continent, supervises banks and underwrites the euro, used by 19 countries with 341m citizens. The ECB's outgoing boss, Mario Draghi, who steps down in October after eight years in charge..
Huge demonstrations have rattled the territory's government - and the leadership in Beijing Three things stand out about the protesters who rocked Hong Kong this week. There were a great many of them. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in what may have been the biggest demonstration since Hong Kong was handed back to China in 1997. Most of them were young - too young to be nostalgic about..
Sex scandals. And Donald Trump Forty years ago in Houston, Texas, a group of conservative pastors pulled off a heist at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention that reshaped both America's biggest Protestant denomination and its national politics. Liberal Baptists, who had dared question the literal truth of the Genesis myth, were denied leadership positions and, in due course, dri..
A loopy policy has moved the debate in a helpful direction One of Elizabeth Warren's formative political tangles, which prompted her move from law professor at Harvard to senator from Massachusetts, occurred in 2005 over a bankruptcy reform bill. Ms Warren was concerned about the repercussions for middle-class Americans, especially women, who would have a harder time filling for bankruptcy as a ..
The city council wants to make Hart Island more accessible "No one who sleeps there had a dollar to their name in life... the bodies interred here are as utterly forgotten and wiped away as if they never existed." This is how the New York Herald described Hart Island in 1874, five years after the city began burying its poor on the island off the Bronx. A century and a half later the poor and unc..
The Right Nation was last this enthusiastic about left-wing policies in 1961 Americans are more in favour of "big-government" policies today than at any point in the last 68 years. That is the conclusion of James Stimson, a political scientist, who has analysed long-running polls from the Universities of Chicago and Michigan to come up with annual estimates of the "public mood". Mr Stimson estim..
Is offering assistance to illegal immigrants a protected religious practice? One trouble with liberty is that you never know what people will do with it. In recent years, American conservatives have been passionate defenders of individual religious freedoms, such as the right to have nothing to do with same-sex weddings. But Scott Warren, an idealistic geographer who is facing felony charges for..
How Warren Buffett's billions may help Bernie Sanders defy ABBA Bernie Sanders, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, will face plenty of opposition to his latest plan to force companies to hand over shares to workers. But at least he will not have to compete with ABBA. When the Swedish Social Democrats proposed the same idea in 1982, the pop group behind "The Winner Takes it A..
The chasm in life-expectancy that once existed has nearly closed Back in 1980 when Harlem was still a byword for poverty, criminality and the decline of New York City, black men in the neighbourhood had a worse chance of living to the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh did. At that time Harlem's residents - almost all of them black, and many of them poor - died of heart disease at double the rate ..
Officials in Washington should be careful how they respond As events unfold in Hong Kong, the world is watching closely. Vladimir Putin, who this week had to deal with demonstrations of his own, can observe a fresh with Xi Jinping, his partner in a new axis of authoritarianism. Britain, the former colonial ruler, called for calm and urged the Hong Kong government to heed the concerns of its peop..
Content moderators do a vital job - often for a pittance They are paid to spend their days watching filth: beheadings and chemical weapons attacks, racist insults and neo-Nazi cartoons, teenagers encouraging each other to starve, people having sex with animals or with ex-lovers against whom they want revenge. When batches of images leap onto their screens, their screens, they must instantly sort..
High-tech wheels Punctures always seem to strike at the most irksome times. Scrambling around on the ground to change a wheel in the wet on the side of a busy road is a sure way to ruin any journey. And punctures can be extremely dangerous, especially if a tyre blows out at high speed on a motorway. For decades carmakers have sought various solutions, but with new materials and novel manufacturi..
Electric currents can help lateral thinking and cognitive flexibility Paul Mccartney famously took the melody for "Yesterday" from a dream, while Thomas Edison argued that his best ideas came from hard work. Others have looked to coffee, drugs or love. But what if creativity could be turned on with a flick of a switch? Elisabeth Hertenstein at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and her colleag..
A better way to edit DNA and a Russian scientist announces plans to make more designer babies As far as experts are concerned, the technology of gene editing is nowhere near ready to be used to create gene-edited babies. This, of course, is separate from the question of whether it is morally right to do so. Nevertheless, around the world, would-be baby tinkerers have failed to get the memo. This..
Where no neural network has gone before Much of the information that is beamed back from space is unless. Pictures taken by satellites orbiting the Earth take days to download, only to show lots of cloud obscuring the area of interest. The subject matter may also be surrounded by irrelevant information. All this uses up a lot of valuable bandwidth. Processing data in space, before transmission, ..