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FOR SEVEN decades Britons had daily contact with their queen, as they handled notes and coins bearing Elizabeth II's face. When Elizabeth died in September 2022 she was succeeded on [...]

AFTER SAM ALTMAN was sacked from OpenAI in November of 2023, a meme went viral among artificial-intelligence (AI) types on social media. 'What did Ilya see?' it asked, referring to [...]

Like people, many animals enjoy having a drink every now and again. Rather than sip brandy or Chablis, though, they feed on fermented fruit, but the effects are the same. [...]

Lines stretched around the block, motionless, as voters stood for hours in the searing heat of a Namibian summer, waiting for ballot papers. On November 27th, long after voting had [...]

IN FEBRUARY 1946, in the depths of a Moscow winter, an American diplomat sent a remarkable cable to Washington. On paper, George Kennan's 'Long Telegram' was a reply to a [...]

'That's not a woman's position,' a straw-hatted Amish man in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, says wistfully, referring to the presidency. 'I've got [voter-registration] papers in my pocket right now.' He's been [...]

Modern life offers many troubling questions. Is AI conscious? How do you stimulate economic growth? And do you really have to take that funny bit of paper at the bottom [...]

America wants South-East Asians to know that it is the region's best friend. In summits, white papers, speeches and private asides since coming to office in 2021, officials of the [...]

Could Earth once have had a planetary ring like the ones around Saturn? Scientists from Monash University in Australia think so. In a recent paper they identify 450m-year-old craters that [...]

Our cover this week is unusual in that it does not appear on paper. Because we had a double print edition last week, this issue exists exclusively in its digital [...]

On paper Ismail Haniyeh, assassinated in Tehran on July 31st, was Hamas's supreme leader. When in 2022 he ran for a second term in that role, he was unopposed. But [...]

On paper, Mercia School in the north of England is a forbidding and unfashionable place. Teachers focus unrelentingly on 'the acquisition of knowledge', if its intimidating website is any guide. [...]

For a place that is often described as left behind, Teesside receives a lot of attention from politicians. The Evening Gazette, a local paper, tallied over ten visits by Boris [...]

MORE THAN two decades have passed since we published an academic paper linking the legalisation of abortion to the enormous decline in American crime since the 1990s. The underlying theory [...]

Winners of the Nobel prize in economics tend to sprinkle their papers with equations. Daniel Kahneman, who died on March 27th, populated his best-known work with characters and conundrums. Early [...]

He had lost it again. It must have slipped down somewhere, between his papers and the low table he liked to work at. He was so careless with his stuff—all [...]

Readers of this paper will probably need no reminder that most of the universe is missing. The atoms and light you see—from people to planets, stars and galaxies—make up just [...]

DETERRENCE IS A simple concept: using the threat of force to stop an enemy from doing something. On paper, America should have no trouble restraining Iran thus. The former has [...]

HIS OWN musical career looked fairly good on paper. He had more than 100 serious works to his name. The National Symphony, the Minnesota Opera and several string quartets had [...]

BACKPACKS full of cash, Caribbean condominiums and 1.1bn unexplained pesos ($281,000): these sound like details in a John le Carré novel, not the stuff of court papers. And yet all [...]

'Magnets, how do they work?' asked Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo, in their 2009 song 'Miracles'. A flurry of recent papers suggests physicists did not quite have the full [...]

As the Chinese proverb almost says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single white paper. That, at least, is how a lot of EU policy is made. [...]

Many economists believe that generative https://www.economist.com/topics/artificial-intelligence is about to transform the global economy. A paper published last year by Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu of Epoch, a research firm, argues [...]

In 2010 researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA), in Leipzig, published the genome of Homo neanderthalensis, a species known in less progressive days as Neanderthal man. [...]

When word reached the president that the FBI, without informing him, had warned members of Congress that a foreign nation was meddling in American politics, he blew his stack. He [...]

Motivational quotes. Videos of Steve Jobs saying absolutely anything. Clips of a baby elephant being rescued from a river. You do not have to scroll for long on LinkedIn, a [...]

NEW YORKERS who wished to gamble used to be limited to a series of peculiar options: a lottery run by the state, raffles run by charities, casinos run by Native [...]

When economists explain the financial crisis that hit the 'tiger economies' of Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea, among others, in 1997, some reach for the term 'crony capitalism'. A cosy [...]

Emmanuel Macron, France's president, had barely landed from Saudi Arabia when he lost another prime minister, his third this year. On December 4th, in a vote of no confidence, an [...]

The spinal cord is the control cable that connects the brain to the rest of the body. If it is severed, people lose the ability to https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/05/20/a-promising-non-invasive-technique-can-help-paralysed-limbs-move below the site [...]

'No sane man would want the papacy,' a cardinal tells Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) at the start of 'Conclave', a new film. Perhaps that is why so many popes [...]

Editor's note: On December 1st Manchester City lost to Liverpool, 2-0. PEP GUARDIOLA isn't used to losing. Since becoming Manchester City's manager in 2016, he has won 18 trophies, including [...]

At this time of year, as they await their Christmas bonuses, people on Wall Street ponder their worth. Two questions can sharpen the mind of even the most senior employee. [...]

Many people in America hope that the new Trump administration will take an axe to a bloated and overbearing government, cutting spending and rolling back regulation. Whether this goal is [...]

FOR TWO years the war in Ukraine has been fought metre by blood-soaked metre. Suddenly, dramatic change is at hand. One reason is that Russia's grinding advance has exposed grave [...]

THE SENSE that the COP29 climate talks were outstaying their welcome in Baku was tangible through growing absences. Over the 30 hours between the scheduled end on Friday November 22nd [...]

The Central American Parliament (Parlacen) is not popular. It is a space of 'impunity, nepotism and waste' according to one Guatemalan congressman. José Raúl Mulino, Panama's president, laments that he [...]

Almost every day of the week, for more than six decades, Frank Auerbach would stride along Mornington Crescent. It was, and is, a typical North London street: tall terraced houses [...]

WHEN JIMMY Carter, the Democratic candidate for American president in 1976, wanted to criticise the record of the incumbent Gerald Ford, he reached for a number invented by the economist [...]

For young high-flyers with an interest in marine conservation, it is the perfect gig. A charity is hunting for eager graduates (with at least a high upper-second degree and excellent [...]

In 1971 John Connally, then the American treasury secretary, told his European counterparts that the dollar was 'our currency, but your problem'. Over the following half-century the global economy has [...]

To grasp how bad things are in Lebanon, consider that Syria—where war and tyranny created the world's largest refugee crisis—now seems like a safe haven. Since September around 500,000 people [...]

'IS MODI STILL THE PM?' read a text received by Banyan one recent afternoon. 'I'm getting Modi withdrawal,' admitted the sender. It is usually difficult to notice the absence of [...]

Track our https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/results/president, sign up to our daily newsletter on American politics, 'https://www.economist.com/newsletters/us-in-brief', and read the https://www.economist.com/topics/the-us-elections-of-2024. You have to hand it to Elon Musk. The man who plumbed the [...]

Corpses were the cause. If you have ever looked at a lapel in November and wondered why the poppy is the flower pinned to it, then the answer is corpses, [...]

EARLY IN THE morning of November 6th, as Europe digested the result of America's presidential election, three senior figures in Germany's government were huddling for crisis talks in Berlin. But [...]

Over the past year the two men leading Israel's war effort could barely hide their contempt for each other. So when Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, announced on November 5th [...]

SPACE ROCKS collide with Earth's atmosphere all the time. The vast majority are too small to do any damage, but the risk of a larger asteroid (or comet) wiping out [...]