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British companies are drowning in unnecessary paperwork. An antiquated system, whereby a few listed shares are held in paper form and the holders are entitled to physical copies of documents, [...]

FOR INFANTRY and armoured cavalry, target practice is relatively straightforward. Load up on training rounds and aim for paper bullseyes, plywood cutouts or life-size models of enemy vehicles. Air-defence forces [...]

Sign up https://www.economist.com/newsletters/us-in-brief to receive 'The US in brief' as a newsletter, each weekday, in your inbox. Donald Trump promised on social media to 'TELL IT LIKE IT IS!' at [...]

Editor's note (March 4th 2025): This story has been updated. IN A SLEEK business tower in Kyiv, a group of engineers huddle around a new, carbon black attack drone called [...]

Hundreds of Syrians gathered on February 25th in the opulent reception hall of what is now called the People's Palace in Damascus. They had come to discuss a new constitution. [...]

A BABY BORN on the same day as the Indian republic—January 26th 1950, when the constitution went into effect—probably would not have lived to see the 75th-anniversary celebrations last month. [...]

'A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!' In 'Pride and Prejudice' Jane Austen did not have to explain [...]

Thirty years ago Siddharth Dube, a writer, visited a small village in northern India near the site of a historic peasants' revolt. He found plenty that remained enraging: mud huts, [...]

One of the biggest fears about Donald Trump's approach to the economy was that he might try to undermine the Federal Reserve's independence and press it to cut interest rates. [...]

WITHIN HOURS of his party winning national elections, https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/02/23/merz-wins-a-messy-election-then-calls-for-independence-from-america, Germany's presumptive next leader, offered a bombshell on national television. Donald Trump 'does not care much about the fate of Europe,' [...]

In the late 2010s eight macaque monkeys were born at a laboratory in Shanghai. At first they seemed much like the other infants in the colony, but differences soon became [...]

One of the greatest scandals in modern science began with a late-2010s advertisement for HIV-positive couples looking to have children through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). The ad had been put out [...]

THERE were rules at Pableaux Johnson's Monday dinners. No phones: pay attention to the people around you. Don't sit next to someone you know. Bring something to drink if you [...]

The arc of management bends towards sitting on your arse. You may intend to get away from your desk, but it holds you there nonetheless. There are always more emails [...]

A mix of MAGA purists and internationalist Republicans staffed Donald Trump's first administration, with the old establishment generally holding the upper hand. But in his second term the populists are [...]

RONAN KANDA had just visited a friend after school to buy a PlayStation controller. As he left the house, headphones on, the 16-year-old probably had no idea that he was [...]

After peaking in 2022 at 11% year on year, inflation across the rich world has steadily fallen. Until now. As central banks bring down interest rates, headline inflation across the [...]

It should be a management consultant's dream. The organisation is immense. The bloat is obvious. And the new boss is eager to shake things up. President Donald Trump and his [...]

A huge statue of Mao Zedong still stands near the entrance to Zhejiang University, surveying the transformation of the eastern city of Hangzhou, 175km south-west of Shanghai. Such statues look [...]

France has not allowed smartphone use in primary or secondary schools since 2018, claiming that it would help children focus, reduce their social media use and mitigate online bullying. The [...]

Sign up https://www.economist.com/newsletters/us-in-brief to receive 'The US in brief' as a newsletter, each weekday, in your inbox. The Office of Personnel Management told the heads of federal agencies to fire [...]

Esther Hernández fled Venezuela to Colombia in 2017 with her husband, three daughters and a sewing machine. Her voice cracks as she recalls sleeping in a shelter, cooking on an [...]

The gut reaction that a manager has when an employee announces their resignation is telling. Sometimes it is genuine dismay: the person leaving is a star. Sometimes disappointment is mixed [...]

Of all the levels of the dismal science, his was the lowliest of all. At the very mention of the words "traffic" or "parking", academics sniffed. What could be more [...]

LAST MONTH Jemima Bunbury and Daan Ferdinandusse incorporated Sartor Technologies, their fashion-tech startup, in America and started decamping from London to San Francisco to seek a seed round of funding—barely [...]

Sign up https://www.economist.com/newsletters/us-in-brief to receive 'The US in brief' as a newsletter, each weekday, in your inbox. The Trump administration's burst of Ukraine-related diplomacy—which included https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/02/12/donald-trump-starts-immediate-talks-with-vladimir-putin-on-ukraine to the presidents of [...]

In early February Openai, the world's most famous artificial-intelligence firm, released Deep Research, which is 'designed to perform in-depth, multi-step research'. With a few strokes of a keyboard, the tool [...]

ON FEBRUARY 13th 2023 an object with extraterrestrial origins went screaming through the Mediterranean Sea off the Sicilian coast. A single, super-energetic subatomic particle left a sparkling trail of light [...]

Sign up https://www.economist.com/newsletters/us-in-brief to receive 'The US in brief' as a newsletter, each weekday, in your inbox. Donald Trump signed an executive order formalising the Department of Government Efficiency's authority [...]

This is the introduction to Blighty, a weekly, subscriber-only newsletter in which our correspondents turn their gaze on the latest developments in Britain. https://www.economist.com/newsletters/blighty . Matthew Holehouse, our British political [...]

IS LUCY LETBY guilty? The question has persisted since August 2023, when a jury found the nurse had murdered seven babies and tried to kill six others at the Countess [...]

Diets come and diets go. One of the most popular today is 'intermittent fasting' in which, as the name suggests, the idea is to limit one's food intake to certain [...]

For American consumers, online shopping has just got dearer. On February 1st Donald Trump did away with a decades-old provision, known as the de minimis waiver, that exempted goods under [...]

Walk down the passage connecting the subway on 34th Street-Herald Square to a commuter line bound for New Jersey and you will almost certainly see people sleeping rough. The tunnel [...]

Free love. Psychedelic drugs. Embroidered Moroccan cushions. Nietzsche. Zen. Tribal trinkets. Customised existentialism. Ossie Clark dresses with knee-high boots. (Later, it was all ruffled blouses and cloaks from the Antique [...]

Doctored. By Charles Piller. Atria; 352 pages; $28.99. Icon Books; £20 Alzheimer's disease affects more than 30m people worldwide, mostly the elderly. After the age of 65, the chance of [...]

DONALD TRUMP took North America to the https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/02/02/trumps-brutal-tariffs-far-outstrip-any-he-has-imposed-before over the weekend. On February 3rd he cooled things down, delaying tariffs on https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2025/02/02/canada-china-mexico-and-the-art-of-retaliation by a month as the countries attempt to [...]

CARBON MONOXIDE is best-known as a poison. Each year around 30,000 people worldwide die from exposure to the gas, which can be produced by cooking stoves or indoor fires. But [...]

Billund is a small town in Denmark with a population that stands at a little over 7,000 people. It is also the birthplace and headquarters of the world's largest toy […]

WHEN SHAKIR MOHAMED and his male partner wanted to start a family in London, they looked to adopt a child. But faced with a laborious process and long waiting times, [...]

He brandished a chainsaw at campaign rallies, to signify his eagerness to clear-cut the thickets of bureaucracy and regulation impeding the economy's progress. Perhaps more strikingly, he has actually lived [...]

Michel the German, a national personification such as America's Uncle Sam or Britain's John Bull, is a sleepy fellow with a nightcap. He is a bit conservative and not all [...]

TO GET a sense of what https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker/hundred-days did to the federal government, talk to people who work in it. 'I've been with the government for over ten years, I lived [...]

In northern Bolivia, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, lies a savannah called the Llanos de Moxos. This is the stamping-ground of Umberto Lombardo, of the Autonomous University of [...]

RARELY HAS the Bundestag known such drama. On January 29th, to scenes of uproar in Germany's parliament, a tiny majority of mps approved a radical five-point plan to curb irregular [...]

ON THE FIRST day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.' [...]

LEADING THE Office of Management and Budget (OMB) may sound mundane, but the role is one of Washington's most important. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-vought-donald-trumps-holy-warrior , who did the job for the final two [...]

Thirty years ago, making a phone call from Somalia meant crossing the border into better-connected Kenya or Ethiopia. Yet by 2004 the lawless nation had more telephone connections per capita [...]

Over the past century, two breakthroughs have changed the course of biology most. Both were Anglo-American efforts, propelled by Cambridge laboratories. First came the unravelling of the double helix by […]

YOUNG PEOPLE have always come to Ms Xia with questions about their relationships. Now they often ask the astrologer about their finances and job prospects, too. "People feel a sense [...]