A broken system, a broken city: Beirut

Decades of messaging have not worked, so governments are trying new ways to get citizens to eat well, from scary labelling to taxing the junkiest foods. Will it work? The death of a plague researcher in Russia is made more mysterious by the government’s resolute lack of transpare ...  Show more

Bond yields across the rich world keep ticking up. We take a global look at where the risks are mounting most, and just how much worry is warranted. What might have once seemed fanciful is becoming real: delivering daylight to dark parts of the world using mirrors in space. And t ...  Show more

Our correspondent visits town after devastated town. Poorly enforced building codes are <a href="https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/12/turkeys-earthquakes-show-the-deadly-extent-of-construction-scams?utm_campaign=a.io&utm_medium=audio.podcast.np&utm_source=theintelligenc ...

The explosion at Beirut’s port was a symptom, not a cause, of the country’s malaise. We find more questions than answers about the blast and a political class <a href="https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/a-year-after-the-beirut-blast-still-no-bottom-to-lebanons-cr ...

State and local pandemic responses are scattershot; a national effort is all but nonexistent. A creeping sense of fatalism makes for peril far beyond the country’s borders. Aggregate American jobs numbers are promising, but our correspondent digs deeper to find <a href="https://w ...  Show more

Hopes that the continent had escaped the worst of the pandemic have proved too hasty; our correspondent describes a slow-rolling tragedy with little hope of respite. Reading scores in America are shockingly low; many blame how the skill is taught. We examine one state’s