Enlightenment liberalism is losing ground in the debate about how to deal with racism

LIBERALISM—the Enlightenment philosophy, not the American left—starts with the assertion that all human beings have equal moral worth. From that stem equal rights for all. Libertarians see those principles as paramount. For left-leaning liberals, equal moral worth also brings an entitlement to the resources necessary for an individual to flourish. ...

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Covid-19 is here to stay. The world is working out how to live with it

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub YOU MAY BE exhausted but the covid-19 pandemic is barely getting started. Six months after Chinese scientists notified the World Health Organisation (WHO) of a new virus that caused deadly...

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The pandemic has accelerated the growth of e-sports

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub MOTOR RACING has a long and chequered history of cheating, from illegal designs to the use of nitrous oxide to give cars a boost. On May 23rd, however, a new type emerged when a Formula...

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Covid-19 raises the risks of violent conflict

BUNIA, A DUSTY city of perhaps 650,000 in Ituri, a province of eastern Congo, has long known war. Since the start of this year, rebels have burned dozens of villages to the ground and hacked hundreds of people to death with machetes. A rebel group made up of assailants from the seed-sowing Lendu tribe has launched a series of attacks on the pastoralist...

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Autocrats gleefully decry America’s racial turmoil

ANTI-AMERICAN AUTOCRATS are enjoying the spectacle. All around the world, America is being derided for its brutal police and ill-treatment of minorities. For regimes with much worse records, what could be sweeter? For China the timing was delicious. On May 28th its parliament rubber-stamped a proposal to impose a draconian security law on Hong Kong....

Jun 2020

The killing of George Floyd has sparked global soul-searching

LOCAL POLICE arrested Giovanni López, a 30-year-old Mexican bricklayer, in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos, a town near Guadalajara, on May 4th. Why they detained him is unclear. The next morning his family found him dead in a nearby hospital, with bruises on his head and a bullet in his ankle. His name did not go viral; no politician lamented his death....

Jun 2020

Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why?

“DOCTORS NEED three qualifications: to be able to lie and not get caught; to pretend to be honest; and to cause death without guilt.” So wrote Jean Froissart, a diarist of the Middle Ages, after an outbreak of bubonic plague in the 14th century. Fake news then meant rumours that the plague could be cured by sitting in a sewer, eating decade-old treacle...

Jun 2020

Donald Trump has reignited a debate about regulating speech online

HASTILY DRAFTED, legally flawed and unworkable. Experts poured scorn on the executive order Donald Trump signed on May 28th in reaction to a decision by Twitter, a microblogging service, to flag one of his tweets as unsubstantiated. The company had put warnings on a pair of tweets in which the president said: “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots...

Jun 2020

Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why?

“DOCTORS NEED three qualifications: to be able to lie and not get caught; to pretend to be honest; and to cause death without guilt.” So wrote Jean Froissart, a diarist of the Middle Ages, after an outbreak of bubonic plague in the 14th century. Fake news then meant rumours that the plague could be cured by sitting in a sewer, eating decade-old treacle...

Jun 2020

How China emerges from lockdown will affect global tourism

YOU CAN wave to the giant Mickey Mouse mascot, but not get close enough for a jolly selfie. Such are the rules at Disneyland Shanghai, which reopened on May 11th. Visitor numbers are capped at 30% of the sprawling park’s capacity. Meanwhile the Forbidden City in Beijing can now take only 5,000 visitors a day, just 6% of its normal cap. China is leading...

May 2020