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Bernard Arnault sizes up his heirs apparent Bernard arnault likes to describe lvmh as une affaire de famille. The world’s richest man calling the €400bn ($425bn) luxury empire, of which he is chief executive, chairman and controlling shareholder, “a family...

The wonder-technology faces accusations of copyright infringement The footballers look realistic at first sight but, on closer inspection, something is wrong. Their faces are contorted, their limbs are bending in alarming directions, the ball is slightly egg-shaped. Strangest of all,...

Military conscription is on the agenda in the rich world Belly down in a muddy Dutch forest, Sabrina van den Goorbergh fires blanks from a Colt c7 assault rifle. The third-year medical student is taking part in the Dienjaar (service-year),...

Devolution is messier—and weirder—than people think “Buildings of england”, the Bible of architectural historians, is effusive about the Grand Hotel in Scarborough, a chilly, rather tired seaside resort on the coast of Yorkshire. It is “a High Victorian gesture of...

A 300-year-old genre is losing its GSOH Mr darcy, it turns out, was undemanding. In “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen implies that he is a picky paramour, since he likes a beloved to have “fine eyes”, “a thorough knowledge of...

The thorny business of recycling electric-vehicle batteries Recycling electric-vehicle batteries is tricky. But they are full of critical minerals—lithium, cobalt and other commodities—that are vital to the green transition. At the moment most ev manufacturers in Britain crush old batteries...

But campaigners should be careful what they wish for For more than half a century abortion has been a largely uncontroversial issue in Britain. In 1967 the Abortion Act was passed to allow women to end their pregnancies up until...

Firms’ small size is the biggest barrier to automation Sarnies and precision engineering may seem to be worlds apart. But Greencore, Britain’s largest sandwich-maker, spends £20m ($25m) on industrial robots annually. They peel, slice and stone avocados. They cut wraps...

The evidence for co-ordinated anti-Tory behaviour If an election were held tomorrow, our prediction model is sure that the Tories would lose. But it may still be being too kind, since it does not explicitly consider the potential for a...

The scale of the task facing Rishi Sunak is clear There have been 17 elections in Britain since the start of 1959 and the Conservative Party has been successful in ten of them. The next one is almost certain to...

A Brussels hard-right confab descends into a mix of farce and petty tyranny One of the few benefits of Britain leaving the European Union, at least for denizens of Brussels, was that Nigel Farage all but disappeared from the city’s...

Its superdrones can reach targets as far away as Siberia Aguard looks on nervously. With every step, the air thickens with the smell of petrol. Around a corner is the workshop, and the buzz of manufacturing. Inside, lab-coated technicians are...

Will it be enough? The sunken faces that peer from behind battered fences are aged, whether or not the bodies that carry them are old. Russia, eight kilometres away, isn’t hiding. In the past 24 hours, three guided bombs landed...

He is now one of Europe’s leading Russia hawks On january 16th the French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced that he would send another 40 long-range Scalp cruise missiles to Ukraine. Later that day Russia bombed Kharkiv, in north-eastern Ukraine, claiming...

It is time for Xi Jinping to accept that Germany isn’t America’s puppet An official chinese read-out said the summit meeting in Beijing that ended on April 16th reflected the strong ties that bind the world’s second- and third-largest economies....

Its scores are heading down, as its schools fail to adapt From may 1st, the proud holders of doctorates will no longer be allowed to put the title Dr in front of their name in German passports. For a country...

The next elections will be both uncompetitive and unfair The most recent Tanzanian general election, held in 2020, made a mockery of democracy. Agents of the ruling ccm party stuffed ballot boxes, pre-marked voting slips and erected fake polling stations....

Half a million may starve without urgent help It has become a morbid sort of trivia game. Which country has the world’s largest population of internal refugees? The highest number of people facing famine? And where do aid agencies have...