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Officials in Beijing are looking out for China’s interests, not anyone else’s Earlier this year, when the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen were attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea, America approached China for help. In talks with their Chinese...

These shadowy “banks” are becoming the financiers of choice for transnational criminal gangs It is rare these days for America and China to co-operate on anything. As The Economist went to press, America’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was on...

They have not taken to streaming as keenly as the rest of the world When prince sang “Tonight, I’m gonna party like it’s 1999” on his 1982 hit “1999”, he was describing a party during a turn-of-the-millennium apocalypse. He could...

Ola, an electric-scooter manufacturer, is trying to find out When kavipriya, a 22-year-old from a village in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, decided to take a factory job, her family was not thrilled. “My mother-in-law wanted me to...

A landslide election confirms the trend The maldives tends to evoke images of cocktails enjoyed on pristine white beaches framed by gently swaying palm trees. Thoughts of geopolitics rarely feature. Yet they were to the fore this week as the...

Squabbling between the Marcos and Duterte clans makes politics unpredictable Like romeo and juliet, the president and vice-president of the Philippines come from rich, powerful families that are constantly at daggers drawn. Unlike Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos and...

This new business diaspora is younger, better-educated and ambitious In 2021 the founders of PalFish, a platform based in China which connects English teachers and students, realised its future lay abroad. The Chinese government had just launched a crackdown on...

And its economy is unusually well-defended against American politics At cotabato airport travellers must join a long sweaty queue to pay a tax of ten pesos (less than $0.20). Having handed over their cash—cards are not accepted—they must wait while...

The boss of Mercado Libre ponders Javier Milei, self-doubt and the dangers of wokery Even billionaires ponder the path not taken. At 17, Marcos Galperin had returned from a tour playing competitive rugby in Australia and New Zealand, two egg-chasing...

The number of people who succumb to the disease has been rising for two decades For the second time in five years, Brazil’s army is building field hospitals in the capital, Brasília. The tents are accommodating a surge of patients...

As in 1968, the Democrat risks being the candidate of chaos and war Aconnoisseur of radical chic can find plenty to catalogue these days while observing pro-Palestine protests on Ivy League campuses: the black or red keffiyehs, the conga drums,...

A tale of two struggles Every trial involves two struggles, wrote Janet Malcolm, a shrewd observer of the American courtroom. One is engrossing, the other is stultifying, and both have been on full display at Donald Trump’s trial in a...

Moyle v US asks if federal law protects women whose pregnancies threaten their health In 2022, five Supreme Court justices wrote that they were returning the issue of abortion to “legislative bodies”. Two years on, that sounds like wishful thinking:...

Violence seems to be returning to pre-pandemic levels Few politicians talk about violence as much as Donald Trump. In early April, when the former president held his first rally since wrapping up the Republican nomination in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he...

An inept Congress puts America’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the spotlight The clean-energy transition is doing wonders for energy nerds. Not because of any particular policy triumph, but because people beyond wonkdom are actually trying to understand what they...

For all its procedural power, America’s hard right has had stunningly little influence on policy Something remarkable just happened in American politics. Despite intense polarisation, a burst of bipartisanship has enabled Congress to pass vital legislation, over the objections of...

Police intervention at Columbia has provoked protests at other universities Part of the reason Elisha “Lishi” Baker wanted to go to Columbia University, an Ivy League university in New York, was its Middle Eastern History programme. He loved his first...

It must use it wisely Since late February Russia’s army has been creeping across eastern Ukraine. First the town of Avdiivka fell—Russia’s biggest advance in almost a year. Next its soldiers occupied a series of villages farther west. Russia’s progress...